All equipment designated for the Website Management Console hosting infrastructure is best-of-breed equipment from the most reputable vendors in the dot.com space including: Sun, Cisco, Oracle, Veritas, Hitachi Data Systems and F5 Labs.
The flow of data will involve hitting the load balancers, which then balances between the web server farm. The web server then queries the database for information specific to the community being queried. The database returns information about the community to the webserver as well as information on obtaining images and additional content from the fileservers. The content is then presented to the client through the load balancer.
Database System
Phase 1: Our database system consists of many Dell servers with internal and external RAID 5 disk arrays. The RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) array maximizes uptime by allowing continuous operation in the event of a hard disk failure. These servers are loaded with minimum 2 Gigabytes of RAM and 4 redundant 100 Base-T network ports connected to two different switches for maximum connectivity and reliability.
Phase 2: Since the product itself is driven primarily by the database we utilize Veritas’ clustering solution for Oracle to run multiple Sun Enterprise in parallel. This not only provides extreme scalability (up to 32 machines in a cluster) but also high availability by eliminating any single point of failure. Machines will be set to mirror each other in the event of a failure.
The database will be stored on an HDS drive array utilizing RAID 5+ to provide mirrored copies of each disk. The drive array will be connected to the database servers by multiple 100Megabit/Sec Fibre Channel links.
Fileserver System
Phase 1: The file server system consists of a Dell server with internal and external RAID 5 disk arrays. The RAID array maximizes uptime by allowing continuous operation in the event of a hard disk failure. It is loaded with minimum 1 Gigabyte of RAM and 4 redundant 100 Base-T network ports connected to two different switches for maximum connectivity and reliability. The files server utilizes NFS (Network File Sharing) on Redhat Linux to serve files to all of the web servers.
Phase 2: The fileserver system will utilize Sun Enterprise 4500’s running Veritas’s clustering server designed for file servers to provide optimum Network File System (NFS) performance. It is designed specifically to provide the highest level of performance and uptime for NFS file sharing.
Webserver System
Phase 1: The webserver system consists of some Dell servers, VA Linux servers and IBM servers, running Redhat Linux as it’s operating system. All servers are configured with 2 GB of RAM. Other than the hardware differences all of the servers are configured identically to share the website traffic evenly.
Phase 2: Webserver Farm - The webserver farm will consist of many VA Linux servers running Redhat Linux as their operating system. Each server will have two network connections. Connection A will serve content to the load balancers and connection B will provide access to the fileservers, and database.
Load Balancing System
Phase 1: The load balancing system consists of a pair of F5 Labs BIG/IP HA+ load balancers. These units are configured in an Active/Passive configuration so that in the event of a hardware, software or network failure the standby unit will take over activity for the site.
The load balancing system intelligently balances all website traffic to the webserver system. It utilizes a monitoring facility that will check the availability of the database system as well as the file serving system from each web server to determine the best possible performance for each web request. In the event that a webserver has a hardware, software or network problem it will be taken out of the serving pool until such time that it can be repaired and serve pages again. This system also notifies Network Operations personnel when a server is taken out of the load balancing pool.
Phase 2: In order to serve content in the most efficient and reliable manner we will be utilizing F5 Labs BIG/IP HA load balancers in an active/standby fail over configuration. This provides us the capability to intelligently determine the best server to connect to at any point and time for optimum performance and availability. The load balancers also provide a second tier of security only allowing access to the webserver farm on ports that are used for serving content.
