Clusters and High Availability Hosting

Clustering is the concept of taking two or more servers to increase resilience against server failure. if you require 100% uptime you’ll want to consider a Clustered Solution.

Clusters are either Active/Active (where all servers are working) or Active/Passive (where only one server is active at any time). In the event of hardware failure, other servers in the cluster take up the workload of the failed machine. We are able to build Clustered Solutions using Windows, Linux or VMWare.

This may sound complicated and expensive but it isn't as difficult to implement as you may envisage. We’re seeing an increasing amount of take-up in this area with the increased popularity of Virtualisation. This can be very cost effective as a result.

Titan currently deploy a lot of Clustered Solutions for existing customers and the feedback has been very positive. Please get in touch for more details and we can go through specifics for your solution.

SAN/iSCSI Storage Solutions

The concept of shared storage is not new, but is becoming increasingly popular as Virtualisation technologies make it cost effective.

Many high-availability solutions require shared storage that can be accessed by a number of servers; traditionally this storage would be made accessible to servers over FibreChannel, which is an expensive technology.

Due to the costs of FibreChannel, iSCSI has recently become the favoured solution due to low cost and ease of deployment - data is sent over standard ethernet requiring no special switching or hardware. Titan are championing this technology as being highly cost effective, whilst still providing truly superb performance.

We can provision space from a number of iSCSI SANs - some designed for high performance and features, others designed for (cheaper) mass storage. High Performance iSCSI storage would typically be used for Clustering or VMWare deployments, whereas the mass storage suits offsite backup requirements.

There are numerous benefits to providing storage through iSCSI:

• The storage appears as local storage to servers, allowing formatting, partitioning etc
• iSCSI is faster than traditional transport mechanisms like SMB/NFS
• Our enterprise SANS provide much faster I/O performance than internal disks
• Storage can be provisioned from offsite SANS giving DR offsite data storage
• Replication can be used for SAN to SAN high availability
• iSCSI Storage requires no additional hardware in servers, just an ethernet connection

Many existing customers are moving to this type of solution with great success. Take advantage of our experience and contact us to see how we can help you with your storage requirements.