High Availability Added To HCE Cloud Servers

Published by HCE - March 1, 2013

High Availability (HA) is very important on the Cloud (as well as in any traditional computing infrastructures) because it increases IT service availability and reduces application downtime. High Availability is a standard service for all European Cloud Servers of Host Color Europe, active by default, at no additional cost, for all Public, Private & Hybrid cloud servers. It provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against any outage caused by a hardware or an Operating System (OS) failure.

How Does High Availability work on Host Color Europe Cloud Servers?

The High Availability (HA) service monitors cloud servers hosted on Host Color Europe, VMware powered cloud infrastructure, to detect a failure on the underlying physical hosts or any Operating System failures inside the Cloud Virtual Machines. If an outage is detected, the HA restarts the cloud server on another physical host, part of the HCE compute cluster. The operations resume automatically. All services that run on the cloud server return online. There is not need to reboot the server manually.

Could a Continuous Availability be Achieved?

Yes. There is another service on Host Color's European Cloud infrastructure, which totally eliminates the risk of a service outage. It is called "Automated Fault Tolerance" (AFT). Host Color offers the Automated Fault Tolerance as a paid add-on service to all Europe Cloud servers. Unlike the High Availability, which reduces any service outage, the fault tolerance function provides continuous availability for applications in an event of cloud server failure.

Automated Fault Tolerance creates a live shadow Cloud server (Failover Cloud Virtual Machine), which is synchronized and always up-to-date with the primary one. In an event of a hardware outage, the AFT automatically starts the failover Cloud VM, ensuring zero downtime and preventing data loss.

Host Color’s European Cloud Data Center is located at Equinix (TelecityGroup) IT facility, based out of Sofia, Bulgaria. The facility features fault-tolerant site infrastructure and 99.995% availability. HCE Cloud services feature premium Service Level Agreement (SLA) and 24/7/365 onsite NOC management support.

The Host Color Europe's High Availability Cloud servers are also available in Bratislava, Prague, Athens and Vienna.

In Sofia, Bulgaria Host Color Europe (HCE) operates fully-redundant, 100% uptime SLA guarantee network (AS 44553). It features connectivity to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), DE-CIX, Frankfurt Internet Exchange, Balkan IX (Balkan Internet Exchange). HCE is also connected to Telecom Italia, IPACCT, Cogent, Hurricane Electric, Interoute, Telehouse and to other regional carriers through local Internet Exchanges. The company's customers who want to serve any specific local markets can get custom build, optimized Internet routes to various points of Europe. The HCE network provides our customers with best possible connectivity to the whole Europe (London - 47 ms; Amsterdam - 50 ms; Frankfurt - 43 ms; Munich - 48 ms; Paris - 73 ms; Madrid - 77 ms; Lisbon - 72 ms; Athens - 12 ms; Bucharest - 12.5 ms), Russia, Ukraine, Turkey (Istanbul - 11 ms) and Middle East.