Feb
23
2010

NaviSite now features Xeon 5500 series high performance CPUs in Managed Dedicated Servers

Staying ahead of the demand for server resources is a constant battle in our broadband-connected society. The good news for end-users and service providers is that the fight just got a little easier with the high powered Xeon Nehalem CPUs on workstation blade technology. Now hosted applications and websites benefit from the top performance of Core i7 processors.

Intel’s successor to Core 2 CPUs, the new Xeon 5500 series chips feature expanded cache, a Quick Path Interface and a DDR3 memory controller integrated with the CPU core. When combined with Blade technology, customers enjoy advantages like redundant power supplies and reboot capabilities, in addition to the blazing speed of Intel’s latest and greatest.

Critics and technology pundits agree- Intel’s Xeon Nehalem CPUs raise the bar on power and performance. Here are some reactions around the web-
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Feb
12
2009

Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0 – Simplifies Server Management while Greatly Expanding Server Capabilities

NaviSite is pleased to announce the availability of an updated version of Parallels Plesk Panel for our Managed Dedicated Server and Virtual Dedicated Server customers.Parallels (formerly SWsoft) has been the leading provider of control panels for both Liunx and Windows servers for several years.
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Oct
23
2008

RAID Explained & Why You Should Care

Hard Disks have moving parts.  Hard Disks fail.  Hard Disk failures can result into data loss.  Small businesses that loose data are at a greater risk of business failure and financial hardship. The hard disk industry knows this and a recent Carnegie Mellon University study looked at 100,000 hard drives and reached to the conclusion that hard drive manufacturers were exaggerating their meantime before failure (MTBF) rates by 15%. NaviSite strongly encourages businesses to seek solutions and providers that encourage the greater use of technologies like RAID.

Let’s discuss RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) which, when implemented, can significantly increase a server’s reliability and performance while decreasing risk by an order of magnitude.

There are several methods of implementing RAID on a server – some software based and some hardware based.  It is widely accepted that hardware RAID is preferred as it is more reliable and requires less CPU cycles to be implemented.  RAID uses a significant amount of computation processing while reading and writing information.  All NaviSite Dedicated Hosting servers include standard hardware RAID.

RAID Levels are an important concept.  The more hard drives that are in a server – will enable additional RAID options.  The widely used RAID levels include RAID 0, 1, 5, 10.  There are also variants of these core RAID levels.  Let’s look closely at RAID 1, 5, 10 – the three most popular and widely deployed:

RAID 1 – often referred to as “Mirrored Disks” can be considered by many to be a backup solution.  RAID 1 requires two hard drives which store the same data.

RAID 5 – often considered the first step to redundancy includes three or more disks that are “striped with parity” and protects data against the loss of any single disk.

RAID 10 – aka (1+0) requires four or more drives and has the benefits of both striping and mirroring.

In brief, the more disks a server has, the more likely there is “mirroring and striping” with these disks.  Mirroring is the process of copying data to more than one disk.  Striping is “splitting data across more than one disk.”  Striping can increase performance as data that is requested by the server and application will be processed more quickly as it is coming from two drives instead of one.

Important concepts to consider – data that is written to a RAID disk set is written and protected on multiple drives – however that data may be corrupt or incorrect.  RAID does not replace a proper backup solution.

RAID should be a ‘must have’ on your list for a dedicated server – it provides better Data Security, Fault Tolerance, Improved Availability and with striping – Improved Performance.   NaviSite Dedicated Hosting includes RAID 1 as standard on all servers with RAID 5 being standard on servers with more than 2 hard drives.  RAID 10 is available on servers that support four or more hard drives.

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