National Geographic High Performance Cluster
Company. . . . . . . . . .National Geographic
Industry. . . . . . . . . . . .Magazine
Solution. . . . . . . . . . . .High Performance Cluster
Overview
After careful consideration National Geographic.com purchased a Sun Enterprise Cluster with a fiber channel disk array from an authorized Sun Reseller. The Cluster was to become their primary web-server in order to sustain their large, constantly growing traffic demands.
Immediate Problems
Upon delivery a number of problems with the initial configuration did not meet National Geographic's need and the reseller was unable to correct them. The primary concern was that the cluster was intended to be fault tolerant with a high level of redundancy, and it needed to be ready for production traffic but:
- It did not have the appropriate networking hardware.
- It did not have redundant public or private network connections.
- It was setup with an unsupported Veritas Volume Manager configuration.
- A number of disk and operating system configuration issues were not suitable for the NG environment.
Solution
QuaTeams' Sun-certified cluster expert worked with the team to design, test, and deploy a planned implementation for production traffic. They installed a new Quad Fast Ethernet card in each of the cluster's machines, set up three private and one public network connection on each (This solved the redundant network connection issue), and reinstalled and reconfigured all aspects of the operating system and software including a properly supported Volume Manager configuration.
Success
The system is now fully operational, redundant, and is always available. Traffic served has skyrocketed since the installation due to pent-up demand.
QuaTeams Value
- Our trusted team approach with a well tested engineering methodology that was familiar to the customer.
- Certified on the Sun Cluster hardware and experience with high performance machines.
- Already familiar with NG's conventions.
- Already familiar with fault tolerance.
- Already under yearly contract to do Security and Unix and web admin for NG.
|
Projects > 
