“ Which premier class infrastructure providers
can you run my cluster on? ”

We have partnered with two premier cloud infrastructure providers for complete provider-independent redundancy across multiple continents. We can automatically spin up clusters spanning four data centres: two in London, one in the USA (Texas) and one in Zurich, for excellent UK, US and European connectivity. Along with our redundancy features, you get the following benefits:

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  • Network connectivity: we connect via Peer 1′s high performance 10 Gbps SuperNetwork and C4L’s Multihomed IP Transit.
  • Data centres: we operate two completely independent UK availability zones and one US availability zone. Our UK zones are located with Peer 1 in Fleet and BlueSquare 3 in Maidenhead, both near London. Our US zone is located with Peer 1 in San Antonio, Texas.
  • Virtual server environment: you have complete control to choose the operating system, applications and configuration of your machine, just like a physical hosted server. In addition, you can use any web browser to scale your machine up or down and to manage all of the full suite of services that you need for your web application (e.g. domain registration, DNS).
  • Virtualization platform: we use Linux KVM, the advanced virtualization platform built into mainline Linux. We believe KVM is superior to Xen, VMWare and Virtuozzo.
  • Clustering technology: we cluster our servers for redundancy, load balancing and automatic failover, using RAID to keep your data safe and your virtual server running even in the (unlikely!) case of hard disk failure.
  • Server OS: we run our own stripped-down Linux distribution on our servers to host the virtualization platform with maximum efficiency and security.
  • Server hardware: we use high-end multi-processor servers, fitted with quad-core AMD “Barcelona” Opteron CPUs (B3 revision). These are the first processor released by either AMD or Intel to offer second generation hardware support for virtualization, greatly increasing performance and effectively eliminating MMU virtualization overhead.

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  • Redundant IP connectivity: Our cloud is connected to the general internet via multiple IP connectivity providers. In the event of a failure or scheduled maintenance at an upstream provider, we suffer no loss of network availability.
  • Hot swappable dual power supply units: Failure of a power supply unit has no effect on that server’s availability. Failure of power supply units in servers is one of the leading causes of availability loss.
  • Redundant networking cards: Failure of one of the networking cards will not affect availability of that server. Each server has four separate outgoing connections to our switches.
  • Fast 2.5inch hard drives: All client virtual drives are stored on fast laptop style 2.5inch hard drives which have much higher read and write times than typical larger (cheaper) 3.5inch drives. This translates to better disk performance for virtual server instances.
  • Drives in RAID 6 array: All hard drives are in RAID 6 arrays with hot swappable drives. All drives are monitored and any failed drive can be replaced immediately without loss of data or availability. RAID 6 tolerates the failure of up to 2 drives simultaneously without any loss of data or availability.
  • Dual 6 core processors: Virtualisation performance is enhanced with additional CPU cores. We have 12 cores in every server which translates to better virtual server performance.
  • Power Infrastructure: Reliable power supply is one of the key components to provider a true high availability cloud. Based in a data center in Glattbrugg near Zurich, CloudSigma benefits from one of the most reliable power grids in the world, the SwissGrid.

You can test-drive the cluster on cloud infrastructure with our free trial programme.