High Availability in Bermuda

Internet (Bermuda), Ltd. (IBL) grabbed an early lead in Bermuda's Internet market and remains the area's fastest-growing Internet service provider (ISP). "In the Internet arena, high-availability (HA) solutions are a requirement for doing business," says Peter Durhager , general manager of the firm.

The bedrock of IBL's Internet-access and consulting businesses is six Digital Equipment AlphaServer systems running the Digital Unix OS, four in Bermuda and two in the Bahamas. According to Durhager, "During nearly two years of continuous operation, we have experienced no downtime on any of these servers due to hardware or software faults. This represents 100 perc ent availability of services to IBL customers, a very impressive statistic for this length of time." The HA systems are now mission-critical components of the business, Durhager adds.

"Having solid, highly available systems positions us well to implement a variety of Internet-based business solutions," Durhager says.

Durhager says international business is now on par with tourism as Bermuda's largest foreign-currency earner. "Many international businesses are taking advantage of the financial and political benefits of doing business in an offshore domicile," he points out. "Our challenge is to maintain a competitive stance with companies who do business strictly in the U.S. or England. That means having outstanding technology for all facets of our operation."

IBL recently installed an AlphaServer 4000 system, which will eventually be clustered with the existing AlphaServers using Digital's TruCluster technology. TruCluster software allows multiple AlphaServer sys tems to be clustered as a single computing resource via high-speed, memory-to-memory connections. It incorporates all the functionality of DECsafe Available Server, providing the clustered environment with almost 100 percent availability to mission-critical applications and data.

"We are growing at about 250 new e-mail users per month, so clustering is key to our growth-optimized architecture," says Neil Movold, who is the director of technology at IBL. "As soon as we reach saturation, the TruCluster design will allow us to simply snap on another AlphaServer 4000 or 5000 system, with no downtime whatsoever."

Technically, it's impressive, but Durhager tends to emphasize the business benefits that HA computing implies. "By using high-performance servers and clustering technology, we can build a highly available, reliable, and scalable architecture that will allow for continual growth in the ISP arena," he concludes. "Dependence on independent servers is quickly becoming a thing of the past."

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Peter Durhager

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"Dependence on independent servers is quickly becoming a thing of the past." -- Peter Durhager