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RedPeak Frequently Asked QuestionsTopics List:What is a grid?A grid is a hosting platform that's powered by large numbers of servers. This gives you access to a large pool of resources, such as processing power, memory and storage space. Why do I want to run on a grid?
Our grid solution does not require a SAN or other expensive hardware, and is open and vendor-neutral. It supports Windows, Linux and all popular open-source middleware including Apache, MySQL, JBoss and Ruby on Rails, so there is no learning curve to slow down your team. Will these grid servers function like my dedicated server?Yes - you get full root access to the appliance on the grid. This includes root and WHM access just like any other dedicated server. How is a grid server different from a regular server?A grid server behaves just like a regular dedicated server. It runs its own copy of Windows or Linux, and you get root access. The only differences are built-in high availability, the ability to take whole-site snapshots, and on-demand scalability. What kinds of sites can I host on your grid?The RedPeak Grid is designed to support web applications, including streaming media, VoIP, heavy database input/output and high volumes of ecommerce transactions. It is completely compatible with Windows or Linux operating systems, as well as popular open source middleware such as Apache, MySQL, JBoss and Ruby on Rails. Can I host multiple websites on the same grid server?Absolutely! You can even create and manage multiple domains. Can additional bandwidth, storage and RAM be added?Bandwidth, RAM and CPU can be changed on the fly. Changing of the volume size will require a short downtime for the copy and resize process to complete. The amount of down time is determined by the amount of data you have to copy and the size of the previous copy. A bit by bit copy is done during this process which is roughly 2mins per 1 GB of data. What happens when you run out of space on your grid?We'll add more servers! It really is as simple as it sounds. With our Grid OS, we can add, remove and replace servers seamlessly without disrupting any customer websites. What about backups and security?There is a backup and snapshot feature which allows us to make a copy of your install file system. Depending on the file system and type of data we may require a short amount of downtime to make the copy. Once the copy is made it can be transferred like any other disk image. As for security all grid nodes are locked down to maintain access only with firewalls and other security features put in place. We can also offer a front end DDoS mitigation service that will be available for clients hosted on the grid to use. Each appliance on the grid is setup as a virtual dedicated server with only access given to you and our staff if needed via local console. What happens if a grid server crashes? Does the whole grid fail?If any of the stand alone nodes were to fail your application and mirrored data would be automatically redeployed on the next available appliance. This typically takes roughly 5 minutes and has no human intervention. If the controller of the node were to go down then the entire grid will reboot and re-sync itself. This process takes 10-15 minutes depending on the amount of hosts went down but will eventually fully restore itself with no human intervention needed. Can I bind multiple IPs to the same grid server?Of course! In fact, each domain on a grid server can have its own IP address and SSL certificate. How do my applications run?Running your applications on the RedPeak Grid is actually far simpler than using traditional hardware, because there's never any hardware to deploy, configure or maintain. When you run an application, our solutions manufactures all infrastructure pieces needed for it on demand, assembles and configures them and runs your code on top.
This makes an enormous difference on what you can do with your application. To start with, you no longer need to own special hardware: the application is completely self-contained and will run on any grid of commodity servers. Without the tie-in to hardware, all you need to assemble and manage applications is a browser, so you can do it from anywhere in the world. Plus, when you need additional performance, it takes just minutes to increase the resources allocated to your application. You can add more servers as needed, forget about overprovisioning. How do I manage all this?
With the RedPeak Grid, all servers, storage, applications and users are managed from a single, browser-based management console. The AppLogic platform within the RedPeak Grid also comes with a scriptable command-line interface that makes it easy to provision applications and scale them on the fly with a script. What's the advantage?Time to Market: You can accomplish everything you can with traditional co-location, but in a fraction of the time because there's never a delay to provision hardware, rebuild images, test configuration changes. Even rolling back to test previous versions takes just minutes. Scalability: You'll never need to overprovision again. Our solution allows you to scale your service at virtually any time, so you pay-as-you-grow. Easy multi-tenancy: The Applogic technology within the RedPeak Grid makes it so easy to deploy and scale individual copies of your application for each customer. This way the complex multi-tenant architectures can become a thing of the past. Application snapshot: Traditional backups only protect your files. Actually restoring and using the data is complicated at best. In contrast, AppLogic snapshots are a complete executable instance of your application with all of its data. Every time you need you can roll to a running version of your application that runs when restored and includes all the data from that period. How does it work?Our solution replaces infrastructure hardware such as firewalls, load balancers, network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN) and others with disposable infrastructure components that are implemented entirely in software and run on the grid as an integral part of each application. The technology that enables this is called disposable infrastructure. It allows packaging existing operating systems and middleware into disposable components that are easy to configure, assemble, and include with your application. Rather than installing software on servers, applications are assembled from virtual appliances. Each appliance is a completely virtualized runtime environment and software stack. For example, you can build a database appliance by combining your favorite Linux distro and database engine. The resulting appliance is easy to instantiate, configure and assemble with other such appliances wherever a database is needed. This way, N-tier applications become hardware-independent, which makes them easy to deploy and scale. Instead of assembling hardware and then spending weeks cobbling together all the software to make it work, you simply open a browser and use the friendly graphical user interface to take a firewall, load balancer, web server and any other component, drag them on screen and connect. Then you add the HTML files, code, database and content specific for your application. Now with a single hit of a button you can produce a portable executable image of your entire application that includes all of the above. Is it for me?
What are some typical use cases?Deploy applications on standard infrastructure If you're developing software and don't enjoy configuring servers and infrastructure, RedPeak makes it easy to deploy scalable web applications without dedicated IT personnel. Pick a standard infrastructure component from the catalog, copy your HTML files, scripts code and database onto the logical volumes and start your application. Develop new web applications RedPeak saves you time and aggravation when building and testing your application with the exact middleware and system configuration it'll have in production. Simply copy and start one of the standard infrastructure applications that come with the AppLogic platform within the RedPeak Grid and in minutes, you'll have a private N-tier application setup and running. Run it in "sandbox" mode to fit even large application on a single server during test, or use a larger grid to test your code under real-world loads at any time. Build custom N-tier application infrastructure RedPeak and Applogic provides the ultimate tool for designing, building and replicating complex distributed infrastructures. With the visual infrastructure editor and catalog of virtual appliances, you can assemble, configure and troubleshoot your system visually. Integrations that took weeks can be done in hours. What's more, AppLogic makes it easy to pre-assemble frequently used subsystems, such as clustered databases, web tiers, application server clusters, and many others, and reuse these assemblies in many applications, or in several places within the same application. Test and tune N-tier applications Our monitoring system makes it easy to visualize what's happening in your application under load, so troubleshooting and performance tuning are easier than ever before. You can also save a "known good" state of the application for rollback and literally check your application into a version control system to have complete visibility into all changes made to its infrastructure, configuration or code. Achieve easy multi-tenant deployment The Applogic platform within the RedPeak Grid enables multi-tenant deployment of existing web applications without expensive re-engineering. Simply run multiple instances of the application on the same grid and scale each individual instance as required, from a fraction of a server up to dozens of servers. As a result, most applications can be deployed as online services within a week or two avoiding the complex task of building and running a single huge multi-tenant application. What is the length of the contract?There is no long-term contract and all packages are billed upon a thirty (30) day / monthly utility, billing cycle. You are not locked into any long term contract and can enjoy the flexibility of paying for what your requirement are. Is there any incentive or pre-payment discounts that I can apply?Yes. The following pre-payment discounts can be applied:
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With the RedPeak Grid based on 3tera's Applogic platform it is easy to scale and manage the infrastructure for your applications. Because it runs on standard commodity servers, you can:
