Last week, I considered the implications for multi data center redundancy on your applications. This post will look at considerations for the sysadmin – network and server level failover, plus [...]

A few months ago we finished a long running multi data center redundancy project to allow our server monitoring service, Server Density, to survive the complete failure of our primary [...]

This post is based on our talk at Puppet Camp Ghent. See our separate page for all our talk videos and slides about how Puppet is used to manage the [...]

Problems with storage systems, particularly cloud network storage like Amazon EBS or a shared NAS, are notorious for causing complex outages which take a long time to resolve. I liken [...]

I originally prototyped our server monitoring service, Server Density, using MySQL, a database I’d been using for years on other projects. One standard feature is the auto_increment field property which [...]

This is a guest post by Elena Pakhomova who is the co-founder of ReclaiMe data recovery software company. Read her blog at www.data-recovery-weekly.blogspot.com. Storage Spaces is an innovation implemented in [...]

Everyone knows that a backup isn’t complete until it’s been fully restored and verified, regularly, but I wonder how many people extend that testing to other portions of their infrastructure [...]

For the storage of the historical time series data for our server monitoring service, Server Density, we have a cluster of MongoDB servers running across 2 data centres with Softlayer. [...]

Automatic failover is a great way to maximise uptime but it suffers from the possibility of flapping. This is where a failover mechanism is triggered multiple times because sensitivity is [...]

On Jul 24 we received an e-mail from our hosting provider, Softlayer, announcing the availability of a new feature called “Global IP Addresses”. I’m surprised that Softlayer haven’t made more [...]