'Net Features : kemp technologies

Secrets for Dealing with Downtime

Administrator — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:00:00 GMT

:: By Chris Heyn, KEMP Technologies ::

Downtime effectively occurs for two reasons that are either planned or unplanned. Serious downtime can be caused by:

• Network failure either LAN or WAN

• A server fault resulting in it becoming offline

Sometimes it is necessary to take servers offline for planned events including maintenance of the hardware or upgrades to applications or server operating systems. Unplanned downtime can take place at any moment and is beyond the control of the IT department administrators. Causes can be minor issues such as a hard disk or power supply that fails to a catastrophic event for example a fire , a flood or an earthquake. One of the important points to take note of is that downtime be it planned or unplanned will eventually take place and it is not a case of if it happens but rather when will it happen.

Making sure your servers are located in a secure setting is of top importance, for example if your servers are located in the parts of the U.S. that are at risk of suffering the effects of hurricanes, the premises should be constructed as hurricane proof. In addition comprehensive firefighting installations should be installed to protect your servers from that risk. However you can never be 100 percent sure your premises are invincible and so making provision for back up facilities in a different location makes good sense. The intelligent use of geographic load balancers can divert traffic to your backup sites should the primary site be taken off line.

Regular server maintenance makes sense and allows to clean up the server and restore it to its original performance levels, having installed backup servers load balancers and therefore increased the redundancy in your network means these server outages will have less effect on your users. If maintenance is not performed minor problems in your servers will eventually grow more serious and the server will stop working. As you plan your back up facilities consider the cost to the business of unplanned downtime both in terms of business lost as well as damage o the image of the organization.

Don’t confuse the terms server uptime and server availability, they are two different things. Your servers could be running fine but are not available to the users because a component in your network a router, firewall or WAN equipment could have failed, this counts against server availability. By selecting servers with dual power supplies and multiple network cards you can increase their reliability, however to really achieve a H/A network make sure you install two or more load balancers configured in high availability mode.

Defining the Downtime Rules

If you ask an IT Manager about the permitted levels of down time the organization targets the reply needs to be more than just a percentage for example 99 percent. Actual downtime values set on an annual basis are as follows:

• 99% = 87 hours 35 minutes

• 99.9% = 8 hours 45 minutes

• 99.99% = 52 minutes 35 seconds

• 99,999% = 5 minutes 16 seconds

The cost of minimizing your permitted downtime varies server by server and is more complex because different server functions have a different level of criticality. A print server going off line is more likely to be annoying than critical, however it is a different matter if your mission critical database server fails as the damage to the business is immediate. You should bear these different levels of criticality in mind as you estimate the costs for raising the reliability of your systems because of it will cost you $95,000 to raise your reliability on a server from 99.99 percent to 99.999 percent but your business would only lose $1,000 a minute thanks to downtime the investment does not make a good return.

Perhaps the most intelligent method of measuring the server performance is not whether it can handle 80, 100 or 200 sessions simultaneously but the effective time it takes users to complete their transactions. If you offer an e-commerce site where the percentage of users who can complete their transactions at peak traffic periods is too low it is not the number of users who can connect but the number who are unable to complete their purchases successfully that should be the point you care about and intend to resolve because your servers can still be running but you are losing revenue as disappointed potential customers abandon your site.

About the Author

Chris Heyn is the General Manager of KEMP Technologies Italy. He lives in a small village called Arcene about 40kms from Milan. For the past 14 years Chris has been involved in business development for ICT companies looking to expand their activities into Italy and the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Middle East.

Last-Minute Tips to Avoid Holiday Downtime

Administrator — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:42:00 GMT

The holiday season is in full swing, and more than a casual interest should be paid to the looming threat of downtime.

Since retailers and other Web workers are in the midst of their biggest trafficked period, it will pay dividends for website owners to develop a project plan to ensure that no element of their websites have been overlooked. Should you overlook even one part of the infrastructure there is a real risk of downtime occurring. As everyone knows, downtime is bad for business and even your reputation.

Based on the results from the Ponemon Institute downtime costs as much as $5,000 per minute for website owners on average which converts into a staggering $300,000 per hour. Clearly it is important to take all the necessary steps to ensure business continuity. With that in mind, here are tips to ensuring uptime and avoiding the disastrous downtime.

Start by making arrangements with your telecoms supplier to ensure that you have the required capacity to deal with peaks in traffic. These peaks in traffic could not only be caused by the approach of an important date (e.g. Christmas), but also could be caused by promotions being launched by your company’s marketing department in order to generate extra business (e.g. daily deals, social media promotions, etc.).
Having dealt with the external factors, such as telecommunications and marketing and promotions, it is now time to turn to the actual infrastructure you own or rent from a service provider. Server capacity is important. It is also good practice to spread content across different servers with a series of backup servers that can be made available in the case of primary server failure, overload or even malicious attack. However beefing up your server farm is not the only step that you should take.
One should consider a load balancers or application delivery controllers (ADCs), as they play a vital role in your website infrastructure. These load balancers have a number of important functions to perform that will both protect your content servers from being overloaded and provide website visitors and customers with a satisfying experience. You can think of the load balancers as traffic cops, constantly monitoring the website traffic as it rises toward its peak and directing this traffic to the best performing content servers, while at the same time limiting new sessions to those that are heavily loaded.

Load Balancers in Focus

Leading load balancers monitor content server health at Layer 4 and performance at Layer 7. This is a vitally important feature in effective load balancing. Layer 4 monitoring will tell your IT department how a server is performing in general and how it is dealing with requests for content from visitors to your website. Layer 7 monitoring directly checks the performance of individual applications, providing a more 3 dimensional view of what is going on. Monitoring at Layer 7 could, for example, show you that your application that displays information about products that are available for purchase is performing well while at the same time your payment portal is being overloaded on the server in question.

An additional useful feature of leading ADCs is their ability to cache content. The load balancers “learn “ about the most frequently requested Web page content and maintain this information in cache so that users requirements can be served without the request constantly being passed to the content servers. It is advisable that load balancers are set up in high availability mode (HA) for mission critical content load balancing. This means that should one of the load balancers fail, the other will automatically take over as the second unit constantly monitors the performance of the primary device. With your ADCs installed you can relax and prepare to enjoy the festive season yourself or just rest easier knowing your website wil be available.

About the Author: Chris Heyn is the General Manager of KEMP Technologies Italy. He lives in a small village called Arcene about 40kms from Milan. For the past 14 years Chris has been involved in business development for ICT companies looking to expand their activities into Italy and the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Middle East.

Are You Ready for World IPv6 Day?

Michael Garrity — Fri, 25 May 2012 02:30:00 GMT

June 6 marks World IPv6 Day, where many Web companies from around the globe will officially enable Internet Protocol version 6 for their products and services.

IPs are the primary communication protocol for relaying datagrams, or network packets, across a computer internetwork. So, why is this important? Because IPv6 was created with the intent to succeed IPv4, the protocol that currently drives the majority of Internet traffic, and the launch day will officially signal that major Internet businesses, including Facebook, Google and Bing, are ready to get behind IPv6.

If you’re curious about the differences between IPv6 and its version 4 counterpart, the former specifies a new packet format that minimizes header processing by routers, offers larger address space, multicasting, stateless address autoconfiguration, greater mobility and privacy and more. However, at its base, version 6 isn’t much more than an extension of version 4, and many transport and application-layer protocols will require little-to-no change to operate on the newer IP, although there are some exceptions, such as those app protocols that embed Internet-layer addresses.

Load balancer and application delivery controller KEMP Technologies has announced that its LoadMaster LM-3600 load balancer technology has been tested and validated as performing with equal success using either IPv4 or IPv6 at Layer 7. This means that the load balancer is able to provide a high-performing application delivery controller (ADC) solution that will continue to work identically for companies as the transition to IPv6 becomes more widespread.

The tests were conducted by Broadband Testing and found that KEMP load balancers can support high throughput (just under 3 Gbps) for high availability of business-critical Web apps at both Layer 4 and 7 using IPv4 or IPv6, and it offers seamless migration to IPv6 load balancing without forcing companies to accept any performance loss.

This is important because, eventually, deploying IPv6 will be the only sustainable solution to IPv4 address deletion, more so for apps that will be consumed on mobile devices than anything else.

Thus, KEMP has worked to ensure transparent migration for business that will need to access their assets over IPv6 networks in order to maintain performance, predictability and reliability of network services. And now those efforts have been validated using real-world traffic scenarios that pushed the LoadMaster 3600 until packet loss occurred. In some of the tests, IPv6 throughput even outpaced that of IPv4.

KEMP Technologies New Load Balancing Act

Mike Phillips — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:34:00 GMT

What do service providers need to stay relevant with their clients? More and better services, of course.

KEMP Technologies has released a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) product to further enhance managed service providers' and managed hosting providers' offerings, and help website owners gain peace of mind. KEMP's Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) is focused on load balancing technology, where user requests from websites and Web apps are directed to the appropriate server based on availability and the type of request - be it delivering a SSL, caching, compression and more. In other words, the VLM acts as a traffic cop between end user requests and load balancing.

As websites look to deliver a more robust experience to end users - often through new Web apps - they need to ensure that requests are handled properly to prevent an problems. This is load balancing and, in the past, a very expensive proposition involing the purchasing of servers and other hardware. The key is KEMP's virtualization of this effort. In the past, the hardware required to accomplish load balancing would cost tens of thousands of dollars. But now, companies can offer this service for as little as $99 per client, and the charge is only levied for active user accounts. So, re-sellers can offer their clients a way to enhance user experience and prevent downtime by providing inexpensive load balancing through the Sevice Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA).

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