Regions and Zones

Bluekiri Enterprise Cloud is hosted in one world location (at this moment). This location is composed of Regions and Zones. Each region is a separate geographic area. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as Zones.

Bluekiri EC is hosted in highly-available data centers. Although rare, failures can occur that affect the availability of instances that are in the same zone. If you host all your instances in a single zone that is affected by such a failure, none of your instances would be available.

Each region is completely independent. Each Zone is isolated, but the Zones in a region are connected through low-latency links. The following diagram illustrates the relationship between regions and Zones.

Regions

Each Bluekiri EC region is designed to be completely isolated from the other Bluekiri EC regions. This achieves the greatest possible fault tolerance and stability. Currently one region is only available.

Zones

When you set up your solution, you can select a Zone or let us choose one for you. If you distribute your instances across multiple Zones and one instance fails, you can design your application so that an instance in another Zone can handle requests.

A Zone is represented by a region code followed by a letter identifier; for example, eu-west-1a.

As Zones grow over time, our ability to expand them can become constrained. If this happens, we might restrict you from launching an instance in a constrained Zone unless you already have an instance in that Zone. Eventually, we might also remove the constrained Zone from the list of Availability Zones for new customers. Therefore, your might have a different number of available Zones in a region than another user.

Here is list the Zones that are available at the moment:

Network

The F5 Networks Viprion family provides ultimate reliability thanks to the multi-level redundacy architecture, with no single point of failure. The “supervisor-free” Viprion hardware design allows blade failure without causing chassis failure, providing intra-chassis redundancy.

The Viprion family supports redundant and hot swappable components; even inserting/replacing blades on the system can be done without service interruption or failover. You can create multi-chassis redundant deployments with F5 Networks ScaleN technology.

ScaleN architecture provides the ability to scale performance on demand, virtualize, or horizontally cluster multiple VIPRION chassis, creating an elastic Application Delivery Networking infrastructure that can efficiently adapt as your business needs change.

Compute

Storage

Bluekiri Enterprise Cloud Storage is the cloud storage solution for critical applications that rely on performance, durability, availability and scalability to meet the needs of enterprise customers.

Bluekiri EC Storage is an All-Flash array storage infrastcuture that contains only flash memory drives instead of spinning-disk drives. Because of this, Bluekiri EC Storage delivers high-performance, low-latency disk support for I/O intensive workloads running on Bluekiri EC Virtual Machines. With Bluekiri EC Storage, you can attach multiple persistent data disks to a virtual machine and configure them to meet your performance requirements.

The data in your Bluekiri EC Storage is always replicated to ensure durability and high availability. Replication copies your data, either within the same data center, or to a second data center, depending on which replication option you choose. Replication protects your data and preserves your application up-time in the event of transient hardware failures. If your data is replicated to a second data center, that also protects your data against a catastrophic failure in the primary location.

Replication ensures that your storage configuration meets the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Storage even in the face of failures. See the SLA for information about Bluekiri EC Storage guarantees for durability and availability.

When you create a storage configuration, you can select one of the following replication options:

Both storage options are configured in RAID 10 (redundant array of independent disks) which combines disk mirroring and disk striping to protect data. RAID 10 provides redundancy and performance, and is the best option for I/O-intensive applications.

Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) provides the global-active device feature, which simplifies both distributed system design and operations for both SAN and NAS workloads. Global-active device allows organizations to achieve zero recovery time and point objectives (RTO and RPO).

The feature supports read/write copies of the same data in two places at the same time. Its active-active design implements cross-mirrored storage volumes between two matched Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems that accept read/ write I/Os on both sides, which are continuously updated. If a disk controller failure occurs at one site, the controller at the other site automatically takes over and accepts read/write I/Os. Global-active device assures that an up-to-date storage volume is always available and enables production workloads on both systems, while maintaining full data consistency and protection (see figure from below).

Global-active device simplifies and automates high availability to ensure continuous operations for your most mission-critical data and applications: for both SAN and NAS deployments, whether they are block or file. By leveraging some of the unique capabilities of the VSP family, global-active device assures that an active and up-to-date storage volume is available to a production application in spite of the loss of a virtualized controller. In addition, the use of active-active stretch clustering can also be used for nondisruptive workload migration and nondisruptive data migration, without requiring the use of a separate system between VSP systems.

For many mission-critical applications, any failure that prevents access to data results in application interruption and possibly manual failover to another copy of data, potentially at a second site. Global-active device can now provide active-active stretched clusters over local and metro distances. Multipath software allows application access to replicated data from the shortest path for highest performance. Applications can avoid manual failovers and access the second copy of data either locally or between metro-distance sites. This enables high availability and continuous operations with access to data, assuring critical business application availability and integrity.

In order to balance a processing workload during peak usage periods, administrators often move an application to a second server to balance the workload. The concurrent data mirroring capability of globalactive device makes data immediately available to servers at a second site (over metro distances), enabling workloads to be migrated without application interruption. This process could also be used to take servers offline temporarily for routine maintenance and updates, and to perform nondisruptive backups.

Global-active device is also a powerful tool in the case where a second matching VSP family system is being installed and brought online when the primary system has critical application volumes in use. Data volumes can be migrated to the second VSP without disruption to normal operations.

For organizations seeking simpler business continuity, global-active device makes nonstop operations and workload mobility between systems and data centers a reality. Global-active device provides simplified and automated operations, greater flexibility, reliability and scalability and delivers unmatched resiliency by eliminating downtime for missioncritical data and applications.