Frequently asked questions
If you have questions that may need answering about cluster hosting have a look here in our FAQ's.
If you have any more questions submit an FAQ here or call us 0800 4584545.
What is cluster hosting?
Cluster hosting means connecting two or more computers together as a single system to provide high availability of services for users. When a failure occurs on one server in a cluster, resources are redirected and the workload is redistributed to another server in the cluster, giving you no single point of failure.
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What are the key features and benefits of cluster hosting?
High availability - Cost-effectively deliver "5 nines" availability using parallel server architecture with no single point of failure.
Dynamic scalability - Incrementally scale-out your applications as your business needs grow, using commodity hardware.
High performance - Deliver the performance and throughput required to meet the most demanding enterprise applications.
Low cost - Achieve mainframe reliability and scalability using commodity hardware.
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What is SQL?
MySQL Cluster combines the world's most popular open source database with a parallel-server, fault tolerant clustering architecture so you can deliver mission-critical database applications with 99.999% availability.
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What are the typical performance metrics for cluster hosting?
High Availability - 99.999% (<5 min downtime / year)
Performance:
Response Time 5-10 millisecond (with synchronous replication)
Throughput of 10,000+ replicated transactions/sec on a 2 Node Cluster, with 1 CPU Per Node (minimal configuration)
Throughput of 100,000 replicated transactions/sec on 4 Node Cluster, with 2 CPU Per Node (low-end configuration)
Failover - Sub-second failover enables you to deliver service without interruption
Scalability - Near-linear scalability on preferred system configurations.
For cost-effective scale-out:
Add more storage nodes (8, 16, 32, etc.) per node cluster, or
Add more CPUs (4, 8, etc.) or
Add more Memory (16GB, 32GB, etc.) per storage node
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Who are the target customers for cluster hosting?
Any organisation that is interested in mainframe reliability on cost-effective, commodity hardware and software. Typical customers include telecommunication and financial services companies that need throughput to handle high volumes of transactions. However, clustering is an affordable solution for any company requiring high availability.
Cluster hosting provides a high availability (99.999%) database for the mass market. It does not require specialised hardware or skills and it has a "shared nothing" architecture which does not require any additional infrastructure investments.
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What are the minimum system requirements for cluster hosting?
You can run the whole cluster on a single computer:
OS: Linux (RedHat, SUSE), Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X
CPU: Intel/AMD x86
Memory: 512MB RAM
HDD: 3GB
Network:1+ nodes (Standard Ethernet - TCP/IP)
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What are the preferred system requirements for cluster hosting?
Each Cluster Node:
OS: Linux (RedHat, SUSE), Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon, Intel Itanium, AMD Opteron, Sun SPARC, IBM PowerPC
Memory: 16GB RAM
HDD: 4x 36GB SCSI (RAID 1 Controller)
Network: 1-8 Node clusters (Gigabit Ethernet); 8+ Nodes (Dedicated Cluster Interconnect e.g. SCI)
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