The word "availability" (continuous availability, high availability and reliability) now has specific, precise definitions as well as phrases such as "five nines" (referring to 99.999% availability). netASPx Inc., a full-service ASP, has taken the unusual step of defining availability the way customers define it--and actually guaranteeing exceptionally high levels of availability. The company offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee to Lawson application customers on the HA platform.

"We recognize that customers have a very simple definition of availability: if they can use the solution to conduct their business, it's available," said Chance Veasey, Director of Operations at netASPx. "Our goal has been to meet their definition, and exceed their expectations, by focusing on transaction availability. Our architecture replicates the customer's entire business process and ensures that they can perform the business task they need to perform at all times using a proprietary transaction simulator. We think this is much more important to customers than the percentage of availability a given server delivers, or a storage system, or a database."

To help design, test and implement its high-availability solution for Lawson applications, netASPx turned to Sun Microsystems. Specifically, Sun provided netASPx with technical validation on the design of the architecture; loaner equipment to prove that the architectural concept was effective; and key systems and software products to power the netASPx premium high-availability service for customers.

An Innovative Approach to Uptime

With its focus on maximizing the availability of the entire business process, netASPx took an innovative approach to designing the high-availability architecture for managing and hosting Lawson applications. "We knew a clustering solution would be essential to achieve near 100% availability, and we knew that the HA architecture would have to blend seamlessly with our existing Lawson multi-client-per-server architecture," said Justus Gibson, Senior Technology Analyst at netASPx. "Our goal was to allow existing Lawson clients to migrate to a clustered environment with little or no change to standard practices and procedures."

netASPx also recognized the critical importance of creating an integrated topology where all hardware and software components work well together as well as individually. These components are:

• Sun EnterpriseTM 450 Servers are configured in a clustered environment with VERITAS Cluster software

• Redundant high-speed private network connections ensure that the cluster will communicate quickly and effectively at all times

• Shared Sun SCSI disk arrays running hardware RAID 0+1 (striped mirroring) provide data redundancy

• The shared disks provide primary-node and failover-node access to data in the event of a failover event

• Redundant data is managed by logical implementations of private disk space using VERITAS File System and VERITAS Volume Manager software

• Lawson applications communicate with their associated Oracle clustered servers via high-speed Gigabit Ethernet connections

This dynamic, scalable topology provides maximum data redundancy, high-speed connections between applications and data, and the ability to failover multiple nodes so that the applications are never exposed to prolonged failure. The HA implementation will sense failed resources, immediately trigger the failover process, and recover transactional capability within 90 to 120 seconds. In more direct financial terms, higher uptime for applications eliminates many of the costs of downtime. [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter