GlobeNetix addresses many of the issues associated with reliability and availability in its production environment by relying heavily on redundancy, and only using equipment designed for high-volume, mission critical environments. All equipment features redundant fail-over components where failure is most likely to occur such as in power supplies, CPU's, network interface cards (NIC) and hard drives. Most devices are equipped with at least two power supplies, some having three. All servers are equipped with at least two NIC cards and utilize a redundant technique called adaptive teaming that allow instant fail-over in the event that one NIC fails. All servers are equipped with RAID Level 5 (Redundant Array of Independent Devices) storage and all drives are "hot swappable" allowing any disk that fails to be swapped out on-the-fly with out interrupting service.

As an overall strategy, for delivering applications that adhere to RAS, GlobeNetix has deployed in its application environment several different load balancing and fault tolerance techniques. Load balancing ensures that your Web site will operate and perform consistently regardless of the amount of people hitting your site or hitting other people's sites concurrently within our environment. One way we accomplish this is through intelligent switching using specialized hardware switches that are specifically designed to route traffic to servers that are less utilized or are more suited to handle certain activities such as commerce or secure transactions. We also employ other load balancing and fault tolerance techniques at the operating and application system level that allows us to cluster multiple servers together to act as one. Both techniques, when used together, provide an environment that is easily scalable, very reliable and available even at times when there is complete machine failure or servers must be taken out of service for periodic maintenance.

Today's Web differs from the Web of the past, in that sites are truly becoming Web applications. Web applications go beyond static representation of text and images and allow the display of dynamic data from a variety of different sources including relational databases. Your GlobeNetix site is filled with many dynamic characteristics to give you a state-of-the-art look and functionality. When delivering dynamic data driven applications, it is important that the application be built with scalability in mind. Your GlobeNetix application was built to scale using a N-Tier architecture that allows the processing of data and the access of data to be pushed back to other levels beyond your web server so that your Web server can perform the tasks that it was designed, which is serving Web pages.

This all adds up to three things: Reliability, Redundancy and Scalability. The key ingredients to the GlobeNetix Technology and to your confidence with a GlobeNetix Web site.