3-8-tivity's own computing resource requirements are extensive, ambitious, and so are those of its' largest clients. These key requirements are as follows :-

• No single point of failure
• Expandable servers and the ability to dynamically and quickly (within 5 mins) deploy new clone servers as load demands 
• Completely expandable and resilient data storage - practically no upper limit on storage capacity
• Database resilience and scalability
• Load-balancing - i.e. no bottlenecks
• Only paying for computing resources and bandwidth actually used - not having to build and pay for a max-sized architecture up front

 

Potential points of failure are :-

• Database failure
• Server failure
• Disk failure
• Domain name server failure
• WAN/IP failure

 

We spent a considerable amount of time assessing the various technologies available to provide the extremely high availability and scalability required by ourselves and our clients. We came to the conclusion that cloud computing with multiple data centres across the world, using F5 and Xen technologies was the best solution.

Until last year or so only a handful of extremely large international businesses had the capability to provide this "ideal" web computing architecture, and it was out of reach of smaller orgainsations and individuals. Times have changed and now a few companies offer these facilities to non-giants.

Having decided on the preferred web computing architecture we then set about finding the best partners to work with. We were surprised and disappointed by how few cloud computing companies actually have more than one data centre, let alone geographically despirsed data centres!

We feel we have made a very good choice in Amazon Web Services (AWS) - EC2, EBS (with volumes and snapshots), S3, and CloudFront. After a year of putting these technologies through rigorous testing and use-cases, we are very happy to offer the same excellent facilities and experience to our clients.

38tivity is now entirely in the clouds - we have no servers of our own! Not only do we have far greater resilience and control of scale, but it is actually cheaper for us - and it will be for you too if you use our hosting services and/or consultancy...

We think server computing will go the way of electricity supply: many companies will stop buying and owning their own servers and use the economies of scale of cloud computing providers - just like companies no longer generate their own electricity - they use national grid supplies... 

March 2008