Utility Computing dot China » The Cloud

Double ICP Needed

richard — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:59:29 +0000

Just a quick update on ICP since that is what I get a lot of hits for – that and ESX disk woes.

Previosuly you would have to decide between a “normal” ICP as needed for all business online properties. Or a “commerical” ICP for doing trades/shopping cart/ecommerce.

Well if you had the latter – get ready to go an apply for the former AS WELL and IN ADDITION to the latter. Otherwise the nice men at 5PM on a Friday on the phone will be demanding that your site is taken down. Even though you have a commercial ICP and put up the millions in RMB in registered captial required for it.

Zaijian Facebook

richard — Thu, 20 May 2010 09:19:55 +0000

Jason Calicanis sent out an email recently that reinforced what I had already thought. Get out of facebook. Delete and see that useless molasses of nothingness get what it deserves.

Well it turns out that for the past two months I had only been “Deactivated”!

Deleting is a whole new option (hidden – until Jason showed me) that also needs 14 days to complete.

Getting China residence is easier than canceling citizenship to Face Book! :-s

Thermal Failure Protection

richard — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:55:36 +0000

When you have a server (and lets hope it is a real one and not a ZhongGuanCun job) you should enable thermal protection. Because A/C units do fail as do fans and other servers. Thermal protection will cause your systems to shut down gracefully and prevent damage to them and surrounding devices – like UPS batteries.

The following is a screen shot of a log from one client, who has a fairly large rack and a few servers for their thin client deployment. In this case the A/C failed and the servers shut down gracefully.

First noting the rising temperature and alerting CANDIS through our monitoring system and then when the failure threshold was met – issuing a shut down command to the OS and then powering off the server. All this happened on a long weekend and the final shut down was alerted to us as well.

Worked like clock work. Then again – I walk into many IDC’s in China and see flashing red failure LEDs and it seems they are forever on. Do SysAdmins in China not setup hardware monitoring? Do they not care? Why is this? Why would you want a failure to occur or interrupt your free time or your clients business?

Got Servers? FaceBook has 30K!

richard — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:53:52 +0000

Good to see that good old memcached is in use too!

I like their ratio of engineers to users… in China it is about the opposite. We had 6 people come to change a light bulb last week. Labour is a cheap commodity – but smart use of technology will be even cheaper!

FaceBook Infrastructure

Korea and Hong Kong Cluster Deployments

richard — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:48:54 +0000

CANDIS staff have just returned from building out some redundant clusters in Korea and Hong Kong for a foreign Banking client. The whole process took 4 days, for 2 locations, 2 cities and 4 clusters. CANDIS is glad that we were able to help our clients manage the deployment with native language support and avoiding expensive travel for EU/US based engineers.

All up it was 70 servers deployed with full remote management and power and network port control.

Images can be seen over at: Cross posted to the CANDIS Group Blog.

China Internet Cut Off

richard — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:44:26 +0000

Well it is getting worse.

Is it the fact that the APCN-2 cable was severed in Taiwan again from the typhoon/earthquake?

Is it China Telecom with poor BGP? (Confirmed from our provider)

Is it the October 1st anniversary coming up?

Is it another batch of Edison Chen nude starlet photos doing the rounds?

Who knows… what I do know is that our private links to HK and then to the world are fine! Got to looove all the hard work those people in CANDIS put in to plan and manage against this VERY TYPE of thing for their clients.

Currently locally hosted sites work – but if this goes on like last time the cable was cut from the earthquake in 2007 – even they (local sites) will fail because DNS will fail because there are no root servers for DNS in China, most registrars are also not in China and well… you get the idea. No point being able to connect if you do not know where to connect!

CANDIS got a mention in a Drupal.org write up for our work with TheBeijinger.com

richard — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:09:52 +0000

While no way near as cool or professional as my stint in CNN a couple of years back. It is still cool though;

http://drupal.org/node/357715

Busy Bee, China Storage Fabric, Thin Clients, iSCSI SAN’s and more

richard — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:34:04 +0000

Been a bit busy of late. Many new clients and some large contracts (our largest to date). Our utility infrastructure has grown a lot too. Some of the projects and services that we are working on now and hope to launch very soon are:

- Grid Computing

- China wide redundant “Storage Fabric”

- China Optimised International and Local Routing

- Geographic IP and IDC Failover

- More thin client goodness

BTW – never use Windows Server 2008. It sucks. It has “VISTA” written all over it….literally in all the help files and what not. It is a true dog of an OS…but the Terminal Services support is WAAAAAY better. Not that W2K3 was bad – this is just even more fluid – especially under virtualisation.

Will update soon.