Mac Mini Clusters

For most businesses reliability and performance are both critical. Whilst performance gets cheaper every year, reliability is still expensive. One approach is to buy progressively more expensive servers with every increasing levels of built in redundancy. RAID will protect you from disk failure but adds to the hardware costs. Redundant hot-swap power supplies improve reliability but substantially increase the power consumption of your server. You require a server without a single point of failure, which eventually leads to an idle hot standby machine.

With a Mac Mini cluster the standby machines are live at all times adding performance to your application. You know that your backup has a working configuration because it's serving pages constantly.

One solution is to use a cluster of Mac Minis, the simplest configuration runs two Macs side by side with a replicated database and a load balanced pair of webservers. In the event of a total system failure the remaining machine takes over and the site continues to operate at a decreased performance level until replacement hardware is installed.

This provides an excellent level of redundancy and scalability, the performance of your cluster can be increased while it's running by adding more Macs into the cluster, we have a stock of Macs running in the data centre so under most circumstances replacement hardware can be installed without a site visit. Additional Mac Minis can be added from our stock to the cluster in a matter of hours.

Pricing

Base server cluster, £220/month or £2200/year

Two managed 2Ghz/2GB Mac Minis located in the same data centre.
Pound (load balancer) configuration on both.
Apache configuration or clustered Tomcat configuration *
Replicated MySQL configuration or PostgresQL with warm standby
Synchronisation scripts
24/7 application specific monitoring with failover done by Mythic Beasts staff **
Free internal bandwidth
200GB monthly transfer

Under normal circumstances you have 4 2Ghz cores running your application. This scales simply by adding more servers to the cluster.

The target time for service restoration in the event of a complete or partial server failure is under one hour.

Additional servers £85/month or £850/year

2Ghz/2GB Mac Mini.
Apache configuration or clustered Tomcat configuration *
Synchronisation scripts
24/7 monitoring with failover done by Mythic Beasts staff.
Free internal bandwidth
100GB extra monthly transfer

In the event of the failure of an additional server, the machine will be powered off, and restored to the cluster during normal working hours.

* There are multiple ways of configuring Tomcat to work in a cluster, either multicast sessions, jdbc mysql sessions or sticky sessions on the load balancer. Please contact us to discuss the implications on your application.

** Mythic Beasts use manual failover between the Mac Minis. Whilst automatic failover is more desirable, it is almost always possible to end up with a situation where both machines believe they are the primary which results in database corruption. If you would like an automatic failover system using MySQL cluster or Postgresql please contact us for a discussion and pricing.

Interested?

If you're interested in a Mac Mini cluster or would like to know more about the cluster services and customers who've used it, please drop us an email at sales@mythic-beasts.com. We are more than happy to support non standard or more complicated configurations, e.g. memcached, mogilefs or other packages.