Case study: AusRegistry turns to Linux clusters
AusRegistry has bet a bit more than just its Web site on Linux. The company, which in July this year began running the official registry services for the majority of .au domains, is relying on Linux to run its entire registry system.
Despite the relative scarcity of local companies running mission critical applications on Linux, AusRegistry didn’t think twice about using it. “Linux is our preferred operating system here. From a technology point of view, we think it’s far superior. The reliability is considerably better. We never really considered anything else,” explains CEO Simon Delzoppo.
“We didn’t want to spend four times more than we needed to. We were looking for something economical and reliable, and we had lots of experience with Intel servers.” With a total cost of $2 million for the new system, hardware costs were more significant than software spend.
“It wasn’t just a question of paying less for the operating system,” says Delzoppo. AusRegistry’s custom-developed application runs on Oracle 9i and takes advantage of Oracle’s built-in support for clustering.
AusRegistry actually switched Linux distribution during the development phase. It had originally been working with SuSE, but switched to Red Hat Enterprise Edition after the latter added new support for Oracle-specific features.
“We’re aiming for 100 percent uptime, so clustering suits us perfectly,” says Delzoppo. “We don’t have any room for error.” Adding to the complexity, AusRegistry was also working with a revised version of the EPP protocol used for registries, becoming the first registrar in the world to do so. “We’re leading the world in terms of this application,” boasts Delzoppo.
The registry system runs on three Intel SRKA4 servers, each running Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. One system is generally used for EPP, one for Whois, and one for reporting functions. However, each of the main services runs across all the systems in the cluster, so if the main machine used for EPP experiences problems, it can be immediately switched over.
The end result? “It’s been fantastic,” says Delzoppo. The system is capable of handling 260,000 EPP transactions and 370,000 Whois queries per day, and to date there have been no performance issues.
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Warmed over **** That comment is so unprofessional I can not believe a publication would even consider it being printed.