RE: [cobalt-users] Looking for Near 100% Up Time for a Very Vocal Hosting Customer

["* KAPIL *" <kapil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think what your customer needs is some education. Not even god himself
needs 100% uptime. They need a consultant who will explain what their
options are after assessing their needs not someone who will take
advantage of their naivety and just go along with the stupidity by
helping them realize ridiculously overprices solutions.

-------------------------
Stand Up For Free Speech
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-----Original Message-----
From: cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jerry Farquhar
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2002 4:45 PM
To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [cobalt-users] Looking for Near 100% Up Time for a Very
Vocal Hosting Customer


I hear you and even the client is pondering the cost getting up into the
multi-thousands of $$ they even trough a very off the wall number of $50
K

Here is the really silly side to all of this.. they previously had their
own in house Lotus Notes server close to 4 years ago now and at least
once per week they had to call a Notes consultant out on site to resolve
problems. I'll bet between software and consultant support when they had
the Notes server they were paying out in the area of $30-40K just to
keep it up and running and not very well at that especially when you
consider the consultant they hired typically didn't respond to pages or
emergencies in less than 24-48 hours even by phone.

Here is the even bigger kicker..  We have been hosting them free of
charge ( something we offer to contract eminence customers only) and
only had two outages over the last 3+ years neither of which was more
than 24 hours. So all in all if they decide to actually change their
arrangement they are going to go from a $0 cost to likely a $10K minimum
per year cost.

Say here is one thought that comes to mind.. at one point there was a
vendor offering a product that connected to Raq3's physically together
and offered immediate fail over.  Do you recall anything about who it
was and if it might also work with a Raq550 or XTR ?

Just a thought..

Thanks for the feed back!!

Jerry

-----Original Message-----
From: cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Steve Werby
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2002 4:22 PM
To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [cobalt-users] Looking for Near 100% Up Time for a Very
Vocal Hosting Customer


"Jerry Farquhar" <jerry@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> they want to find out the expense and requirements to ensure 100% 
> guarantee of service 100% of the time.

You can make any guarantee you'd like, but you'll need luck on your side
to deliver.  <g>  Even 99.99% uptime is a measly 52 minutes of downtime
per year.

> Personally I think they are ridiculous and it is going to cost them a 
> lot more than they bargained for.

For high availability you'll need multiple physical servers, RAID,
connections through multiple providers, etc. and you'll need mechanisms
and processes in place.  It'll be so expensive that it's not even worth
discussing further unless they have a serious budget.

> Any way I looking for feed back from anyone
> with suggestions as to what is:
>
> a.) The most practical approach
> b.) The most cost effective approach
> c.) The easiest to manage
>
>
> Here is what they are wanting:
> ==============================
>
> Scenario 1:
> -----------
> Primary web & email fails
> (it could be a result of either hardware or software problem)
>
> Desire is to have a second server pick up immediately without any
disruption
> or loss of web site content or email functionality and that employees 
> and visitors would be oblivious to any failure at any time.

If the web content is static it's not that difficult as long as you sync
the primary and secondary physical servers whenever changes are made to
the primary and have a router or some other hardware that can reroute
traffic to the secondary server if necessary.  If the site is dyamic or
is database-driven it'll be more difficult.  If that's the case let us
know and I'll comment.  As far as realistic low-cost solutions to email
related problems go, you can setup additional mail servers which are
lower priority and handle incoming email if the primary mail server
can't be reached.  If there's a temporary failure the email will be
queued and delivered to the primary mail server when it's reachable.  If
it's a long term failure you'd need a mechanism/process to give the
clients access to the email.

> Scenario 2:
> -----------
> Same as Scenario 1 but also includes no disruption even in the even of

> a
ISP
> or Internet provider outage.
>
> FYI - This part seems simple enough to accomplish by having a backup
server
> hosted at a different location on a different ISP's backbone.  The 
> overall problem I see is synchronizing the servers web content and 
> email so that there would be ZERO disruption or user required changes.

It's not as simple as you think.  You would need a mechanism for
immediately and automatically recognizing the problem *and* you'd need a
solution to handle DNS caching to prevent the clients from accessing the
the machine on the IP that is unavailable.  It's tricker if you have to
guarantee that all users (not just the clients) can access the site.
It's actually easier if you have multiple machines at the same data
center, each connected through a different provider, behind a router and
other hardware/software that can route traffic appropriately.

> I'm all ears as to ideas and suggestions..

Feel free to provide more details, but if you have to guarantee very
close to 100% availability per scenarios 1 or 2 you'll be looking at
thousands of dollars for the equipment (nevermind consulting).  You may
be better off cutting the client lose or outsourcing to a vendor who
specializes in high availability hosting.  Perhaps you can coax the
customer into agreeing to a reasonable lower cost solution that
addresses their primary concerns (whatever those might be).

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC http://www.befriend.com/


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