FlexiScale is more robust and scalable after rebuild
After rebuilding from the hypervisor up, FlexiScale cloud computing infrastructure-on-demand has overcome its outage problems of 2008 and relaunches as v1.5 with a new platform based on opensource Xen and Linux.
1 June 2009, Livingston, UK – UK based hosting company XCalibre Communications has launched v1.5 of its cloud computing infrastructure, FlexiScale, after completing a software overhaul lasting six months. Last year the company experienced two unfortunate events that have ultimately served it well as a lesson in having a robust and scalable product and an adequate data recovery plan. FlexiScale was originally built on a commercial implementation of the Xen platform and last year experienced two major outages. Now, having recognized the flaws in its underlying systems, FlexiScale has finally completed its software overhaul in order to avoid blackouts in the future. The first outage was purely the result of human error; an engineer reorganised the data structure on the storage network and accidentally deleted one of the main storage volumes. This was successfully recovered but due to the amount of data involved took significant time. The company puts down the second outage to the fact that the original software platform was not fast enough or scalable enough to deal with the amount of jobs FlexiScale was trying to run. This outage occurred after a near-simultaneous switch failure in the switches that connect the storage to the processing nodes. Once again, everything had to be turned off in order to restart servers and jobs one at a time so as not to overwhelm the system. FlexiScale CEO Tony Lucas acted quickly and apologised at once to customers, issuing immediate credits to all. Looking back at the event he says: “I felt that the Xen implementation we were using would not scale for the amount of jobs FlexiScale was trying to run – as shown by the fact that it couldn't restart more than one server at a time. So we decided to fulfil our original aims by rebuilding our cloud offering ourselves. The new platform is based on open source Xen, with an internally developed management system that oversees the whole platform, including the physical nodes, switches, storage and firewalls.” XCalibre now has real use-cases of creating, booting and logging into servers in under a minute – the company's original goals – and offers significantly improved scalability of launching multiple servers simultaneously, with the current platform able to start a new server every few seconds. XCalibre intends to continue to scale this to starting multiple servers every second as it further develops its platform and software. It also reports that it has received a number of significant enquiries from other hosting/datacentre companies looking to license and/or use the FlexiScale technology. ENDS
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