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Based on some common customer requirements, Bytemark present a solution for a bundle of hosting and management services, suitable for a very high-demand web application, for under £10,000 per year.

Requirements and assumptions

We have based this architecture on a common set of requirements - a single high-demand application backing on to a MySQL database. Reliability is paramount so, with some co-operation from the application, the setup we've described should ensure the application doesn't go down, even if any of the servers in the cluster does.

Component overview

Firewalls

Bytemark run a shared firewall service, providing packet filtering for both incoming and outgoing traffic. This best practice ensures that your applications are not inadvertently exposing data or services to the internet that aren't explicitly permitted.

Load balancers

Our load balancers between them answer requests for the customer's site. They split the load between the two web servers. Under normal circumstances they try to split requests by outstanding requests. If a web server goes down, the load balancers react within seconds and send no further requests to the downed server.

Web servers

The workhorses of the cluster, the web servers run the production version of the application and answer requests routed to them through the load balancers. They hold no first-order data of their own, instead using the database servers as their backing store, or using their mirrored drives as a cache and store for second-order data.

Databases

The database servers maintain mirrored copied of the application database, running as master/slave pairs. The application is configured to write to either, and the databases mirrors any updates to the other one. This maintains a continuous backing service to the application servers.

Pricing breakdown

Item	Quantity	Annual Unit price	Total
Database Servers Premium server: P1: Intel Xeon E5504 (4 cores at 2.0GHz), 6GiB ECC RAM, 2 × 500GB 7.2kRPM SATA discs, HP SmartArray RAID controller, 1TB transfer, 200GB backup space, 2 × 100Mbit/s switch ports	2	£ 1925	£ 3850
Web servers Dedicated server FS11: AMD Opteron 3250 (4 cores at 2.5GHz), 4GiB RAM, 2 × 500GB 7.2kRPM SATA discs, software RAID, 2TB transfer, 100GB backup space, 100Mbit/s switch port	2	£ 759	£ 1518
Load balancing service Two load balanced ports (80 & 443)	2	£60	£120
Firewall service (10Mbps maximum)	1	£120	£120
VLAN	1	£120	£120
Management & monitoring services We charge based on a number of committed hours of work per month, to include responding to alarms, reviewing setup and performing security updates.	4	£1020	£4080
Total annual fee			£ 9808
Budget left over for setup (one-off) 10 hours should be enough to cover setup time of a single application. Bytemark usually consult directly with the application developers on how best to achieve high availability through elementary modifications to the code.	£850

Upgrades/additions

This architecture is the basis for many of our managed setups, and can be extended in various ways, for instance:

Increase RAM

Upgrading all the servers to 8GiB would only cost an additional £440 per year, allowing for many more concurrent requests to be serviced.

Dedicated backup server

Some developers like to add a dedicated backup server where they can dump large amounts of data, and download it to their offices for safe keeping, rather than stressing the live servers - another £825; would get you a server with 500GB of storage.

CPU upgrades

The database servers can take CPU upgrades easily enough if the customer were putting a lot of complicated queries through them - upgrading them both to a pair of Xeon 5530 (2.4GHz) processors (i.e. eight cores on each server) would cost an additional £1980 per year.

Interested?

If this, or a similar quote, might interest you, call Matthew on 01904 890899 to get started, or email matthew@managed.bytemark.co.uk.

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