IMPLEMENTATION OF A HIGH AVAILABILITY SOLUTION BASED ON FREE LIBRE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR NETNOVATION'S EMAIL AND COLLABORATION SYSTEM
The Small Medium Enterprise (SME) sector that requires access to computer systems for their operations is being increasingly attracted by cloud computing schemes. This demand is being attended by large providers of such services but also by other SMEs which assume strategic business models around this niche. When providing private cloud services, reliability is a major feature, trust in that the service consistently performs according to its specifications. One of its key elements consists in the availability of the systems. There are multiple ways to provide it, but the choice of the right tools is not an easy task.
Netnovation is a good example of this type of SME: it is a company that has based its business model on consulting around FLOSS providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and cloud services. Like many others, it needs to provide high availability to its services in order to ensure SLAs established with its customers. There are many options, with economic, practical and ethical implications, but most of them with the same goal.
It is necessary to apply a proper method that allows the choice of the right solution, considering the initial requirements, as well as human and material resources identified for this purpose. The method used has been the Lazy User Model (LUM) which focuses on user needs and the demanded effort to chose a solution to a problem. In addition, suggested guidelines are used that reinforce the initial selection and adoption of FLOSS within the IT infrastructure. Furthermore, Grimoire Metrics techniques are used to obtain specific metrics, with which it is possible to interpret some behavior patterns of FLOSS projects assessed as a final solution.
Two major alternatives were found: the enterprise embedded solutions offering support plans over the provided integrated product, and also modular or standalone FLOSS which needs to be orchestrated in order to provide a final solution. Based upon the guidelines established by Netnovation, the final solution consists in the integration of tools like Pacemaker, Corosync and DRBD, avoiding disruptive changes on the current operational infrastructure.
Among the significant achievements and contribution of the research carried out are:
- An actual implementation has been provided as a solution for the stated problem
- The implemented solution serves as a reference point to provide high availability over other services
- This exercise puts in evidence the potential of FLOSS and its possibilities in the world of private enterprise
Ultimately the adoption of cloud-oriented systems and their implications is discussed. It is important to note that a comprehensive analysis can be conducted through specialized tools able to provide metrics more specific than those obtained in this research. Also the adoption of technologies that can handle other high availability schemes for cloud services is considered as future work .
Key words: Cluster, Corosync, CRM, DRBD, FOSS, FLOSS, High Availability, LUM, Metrics Grimoire, OCF, Pacemaker, Zimbra.