For the extensive corporate websites of multinational companies as well as for (company-) critical services as they are typical today for Internet-based e-business – like e-procurement, e-commerce (online shop), intranet, online market places and ad servers – redundant and high-availability hardware infrastructures are state of the art today. High-availability hosting solutions by Knipp usually consist of at least two servers (cluster), in case of physical separation of web and database servers of four servers, each of which already possesses intrinsic redundancy through use of two power supply units and at least two mirrored hard disk RAID I. Additionally, there are two firewalls and two switches as well as two prepended loadbalancers if necessary. This way, in case of failure of one component, an uninterrupted operation of the system is ensured and the user does not notice the outage.

A high-availability system is also advantageous in case of maintenance: Without interruption, single applications can be switched to servers that are not affected, making a complete shutdown of the applications unnecessary. The complexity hidden behind a high-availability system is not trivial, however. For the individual set-up, operation and maintenance, years of practical experience in planning, networks as well as server and system administration are indispensable.

The qualified and successful outsourcing of high-availability system hosting with dedicated hardware necessitates a clear-cut definition of the customer-provider-relationship. The performance and quality parameters (service levels) to be delivered by Knipp as a business provider to its customer are regulated by our SLAs, which you can read and download here.