Service Engineering (ICCLab & SPLab)

A Blog of the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Category: Articles

The core components of any HA strategy

In his excellent article in Linux Technical Review #04 Jens-Christoph Brendel proposes a new way how to implement High Availability (HA) in current IT architectures. According to Bendel, modern IT architectures continually gain in complexity. This fact makes it difficult to guarantee availability on a certain level. Nevertheless High Availability is not merely a competitional advantage: for many companies keeping availability levels above 99,999 % per year is a matter of existence. Therefore a few systematic steps should help in planning and implementing high availability in your IT environment. This article shows a possible strategy on how to plan High Availability in the Mobile Cloud environment.

benn
Kategorie: Articles, Open Source, OpenStack

OpenStack on SmartOS

SmartOS is an open source type 1 hypervisor platform based on Illumos, a descendant of OpenSolaris, and developed by Joyent. SmartOS is a live operating system, meaning that can be booted via PXE, USB or an ISO image, and runs entirely from memory, leaving the full space on the local disk to be used for virtual machines. This type of architecture makes SmartOS very secure, easy to upgrade and recover. Given its performances and reliability, in the context of the Mobile Cloud Networking project, SmartOS has been chosen to support telco-grade workloads and provide carrier-grade performances.

strp
Kategorie: Articles, Open Source, OpenStack

High Availability on OpenStack

ICCLab’s MobileCloud Networking solution is supposed to offer private cloud services to end users. MobileCloud is based on OpenStack. Since our OpenStack installation is supposed to be used mainly by end users, it is necessary to provide High Availability.

As mobile end users we all know that we want our IT services to be available everytime and everywhere – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. End users normally don’t reflect that this requirement is challenge for system architects, developers and engineers who offer the IT services. Cloud components must be kept under regular maintenance to remain stable and secure. While performing maintenance changes, engineers have to shut down components. At the same time the service should still remain available for the end user. Achieving High Availability in a cloud environment is a very complex and challenging task.

benn
Kategorie: Articles, HowTos, OpenStack

ICCLab & Swiss Informatics Society – Cloud Computing Special Interest Group

We, the ICCLab, are proud to announce that the past Presidential Conference of the Swiss Informatics Society accepted our proposal (slides) for setting up a Special Interest Group in Cloud Computing. The SIG is currently being formed. If you wish to participate and influence the future of Swiss Cloud Computing in this context please don’t hesitate to contact us. […]

Andy Edmonds
Kategorie: Community, News