Nichewares & Consulting, LLC

Server Support

Server support is generally restricted to the physcial server hardware and the base operating system. There are additional server software packages known as daemons such as an email server or web server that are supported, but any trade-specific server software, which we consider Trade Software, are not directly supported. We can however, under the right circumstances, support your trade software too, but it will be in your best interest to obtain support for such Trade Software from the vendor. You probably already pay for support for your Trade Software, so take advantage of it!

Supported Server Operating Systems

We currently support most GNU/Linux server operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows Server operating systems.

• GNU/Linux
  • Redhat Enterprise Linux
  • CentOS
  • Ubuntu
  • Trustix
  • Most others
• Windows
  • Windows Server 2000
  • Windows Server 2003

Supported Server Hardware

Supported server hardware generally includes x86 and x86_64-based systems. These are servers with Pentium or Xeon-based Intel processors with 32 bit addressing. x86_64 systems include 64 bit Intel Xeon, AMD Athlon x64, and AMD Opteron systems. With some limitation, we also support ARM, mipsel and RISC-based systems.

What we mean by hardware support is that we can help maintain or replace faulty hardware components whether hardware is under manufacturer warranty or purchased by you. In addition, the intention of hardware support means that we support installing, operating and maintaining supported operating systems on these hardware platforms.

RAID Support

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks and is one mean of providing fault tolerance for data storage. There are a variety of RAID capabilities found in server hardware ranging from RAID 0 to RAID 50. We can help you configure and maintain your RAID arrays and recover from failed hard disks that are members of a RAID array. There are several types of RAID implementations, but hardware-based RAID is by far the most easily managed and reliable.

Server Clustering

There are three general types of clustering technologies commonly used in server applications. These are high availability clusters, load balancing clusters, and compute or grid clusters. We support high availability and load balancing clusters for Linux systems, and fail over clusters for Windows systems.

High Availability Clusters

In general, a high availability cluster might have two servers, both capable of performing the same functions such as a web server. One server is designated as the master and is the primary handler of web requests. If the master server has a problem, the slave server can take over until the master server recovers. In some cases, both servers might be master for a given task. In other words, it's advantageous to have both servers doing work most of the time. In this case, we have what's called an active-active failover setup. An example could be, one server is the master for a web server and the other server master for a dns server, yet the corresponding alternate server is the slave for each corresponding alternate service. This is commonly found in high availability clusters, since it maximizes the return for both pieces of hardware and minimizes down time for each corresponding service. Lastly, high availability clusters are not limited to just two members, and can have numerous members or nodes to provide failover capcity. The whole idea behind high availability clustering is to maximize uptime for a given service provided by each server.

Load Balancing Clusters

Load balancing clusters are comprised of one or more load balancers and one or more servers which provide a specific service. Load balancing is most commonly found in web server farms, and in this design, there can be literally thousands of webservers, but there needs to be an efficient means of directing web requests to each web server. This is where the load balancers come into play. The load balancer's role is to accept web requests, determine which web server is least busy, and direct the web request to that web server.

Currently, we only support load balancers running a Linux operating system.

Other Server Implementations

Utilizing the power and flexibility of many open source solutions, we can provide servers and network appliances that perform the following:

• Dynamic Routing
• Multiple ISP Aggregation
• Internet Content Filter
• Network Traffic Probe
• Bandwidth Monitoring
• Network and System Health Monitoring
• Web Server
• Web Content Cache
• Email Server
• VPN (virtual private network) Server
• Firewall
• FTP Server
• DNS Server
• File Server