[December 15, 2006]

Building Highly Available Application Servers: Solid Information Technologies White Paper Summary

In order to stay competitive in today’s markets, service providers and carriers are finding they need to deliver value-added products and services to customers, who increasingly are utilizing services while on the go.

Providing the necessary services across the IP

network requires careful attention to downtime and delay, two things that customers have a very strong aversion to. Carrier-grade services are judged by the 99.999 percent up-time standard (also referred to as “five-nines”), which translates to a maximum of roughly 5 minutes downtime per year.

Even five minutes of downtime, though, can be catastrophic for many applications. In a new white paper from Solid Information Technology addresses the challenge of availability, and explains how the company’s products can be used to deliver reliable services.

The full white paper is available to download from TMCnet’s White Paper Library, and is summarized below.

Overview

Solid’s solutions include an embeddable data manager that can be configured to deliver carrier-grade reliability. The data manager provides asynchronous communication, tying together various parts of the application. It also features support for diskless nodes and tunable in-memory data management.

“Reliable data management is a facility that enterprise application developers have take for granted for several decades,” Solid said in its white paper. “The same functionality is now available in a form suited to the unique demands of the network infrastructure. Taking advantage of this platform can result in reduced development costs, faster time to market, lower total cost of ownership for the application, and more robust applications.”

Supporting a New NGN Service

To illustrate how the data manager works, Solid in its white paper presents a service deployed on a blade server

, and shows how the solution results in excellent availability. The example service uses a series of blades in a chassis, with controller cards managing the blades and controller cards under the supervision of an element management system.

In this case, the application server

appears to be a single entity, but in fact the application runs on multiple tiers of the underlying architecture, the result being that if any level fails no loss of service or information will occur.

At the core of the system, redundant copies of on-disk and in-memory data are maintained. A pair of databases are kept synchronized at all times, and the solution’s SmartFlow data management system uses diskless blades.

Choosing a blade server architecture also means that the example solution is scalable to meet demand as it arises, a very important feature for carriers who must stay adaptable in a changing marketplace.

Solid’s solution “ensures data reliability and application availability within any given application tier by providing easy-to-use carrier grade high availability technology,” the company said in its white paper.”

Much more detail is provided in the full white paper. To see for yourself, please click here.

Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page. Also check out her Wireless Mobility blog.

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