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Revision 7 as of 2006-03-25 17:23:38

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SystemArchitecturePlans

1. Details about the next Hcoop Architecture

This page is intended to facilitate discussion of details relating to our next server architecture. Currently, the first draft of this page, written on Sat Mar 25 10:18:12 EST 2006 by JustinLeitgeb, is based upon discussions from the hcoop mailing list. Please feel free to contribute or change anything here!

1.1. Hcoop Future Network Overview

The architecture for the next hcoop.net network involves three physical servers:

Additionally, we will need certain networking equipment:

We should also remember that all of our servers will most likely have at least two NIC's. How can we utilize these best? Some sites have one NIC doing backups or logging, and another handling requests from the Internet. Perhaps we could segment our traffic to two local area networks, one for services to the Internet and another for local file access (i.e., traffic between the two "public" servers and the file server).

1.2. Hcoop Future Network Diagrams

The following are a preliminary version of a network plan that JustinLeitgeb created on March 25, 2006, after discussions on the hcoop.net mailing list. Included in the design is a hardware firewall, which was not finalized in previous discussions. Let's collect thoughts and alternate plans here as we work towards solidifying plans.

1.3. Server Hardware

This may be a moot point as we are looking for a shop that can give us hardware support, and this may require that we buy their supported machines. However, it seems that many colocation providers will try to push us into a deal where their support consists in a "remote hands" plan where they will fix any reasonably standard hardware that we send to them for an hourly rate. If that is the case, our discussions on possible server hardware on the list may still be valid. Generally, we have decided that what we need in terms of hardware is more or less as follows:

The list also discussed hardware vendors. If this isn't a moot point based on our decision of a colo provider with specific needs, the following list of possibilities may still be relevant:

1.4. Networking Hardware

Here we should talk about the specific networking equipment that we need. Ideas on vendors or models for the gigabit switch? Thoughts on if we should start with a hardware firewall device? Also it was mentioned that we should invest in a serial console for remote access when a machine goes down. Thoughts on this?

1.5. Backup Configuration

All are in agreement that we need a robust backup plan in our new architecture. It seems that it will include the continued use of [ http://www.rsnapshot.org rsnapshot], and that this utility will save even the front-end server data to the fileserver with RAID 5. Additionally, we should have data stored off-site in a manner that allows us to recover, even in the event that we are "rooted". We are looking for backup capabilities in colocation providers. Another option could be to have rsync-style backups to some administrators connection over the Internet, but this might not be tenable given the amount of data, the need for quick restores, etc. Let's continue to edit this section!

1.6. Scaling Out

The next configuration should be reasonably scaleable, as we are expecting to grow rapidly in size. How should we scale our systems? Some ideas follow:

1.7. Page version history

Initial page created Sat Mar 25 11:52:03 EST 2006 JustinLeitgeb.

ColocationPlans is the main page for items related to the new architecture. ColocationPlansServiceProviders provides information about the service providers we are currently looking at.