Ninefold is the first Australian public cloud provider to offer multiple Availability Zones across Australia and the U.S providing redundancy and protection for your business-critical cloud infrastructure. AZ 1 and 2 are located in Macquarie Telecom’s Sydney-based Intellicentre 1. AZ3 is being built in Macquarie Telecom's new Intellicentre 2 for private beta in Mid-November and full launch scheduled before Christmas. AZ4 is being built in California, USA and will be selectively released in December, with full access early in 2013. The development of AZ4 means Australians serving U.S. based customers can now enjoy the same performance and low levels of latency experienced in Australia.
Availability Zones - Overview
An Availability Zone (AZ) is a physically separated set of infrastructure, including separate firewalls, switches, load balancers, servers and storage, power feeds and internet routers – designed to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones.
The Ninefold Availability Zone separation is highlighted in the below diagram:
The Benefit – Increased uptime
It's easy to choose to run your cloud virtual servers in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones.
The key benefit in choosing to leverage multiple Availability Zones is to increase uptime of your cloud environment by minimising the risk associated with a failure of a single Availability zone.
Running your virtual servers across multiple Availability Zones protects you from hardware, software, and human errors related to a single availability zone infrastructure. This includes firewalls, network, servers, storage, internet routers and power feeds.
- High Availability: Ninefold provides the ability to load balance or cluster your virtual servers across multiple Availability Zones, allowing true High Availability protection from a single Availability Zone failure.
- Disaster Recovery: Leverage multiple Availability Zones to run hot, warm or cold disaster recovery environments to protect from a single Availability Zone failure – simply align the level of disaster recovery to your budget, only paying for what you use.
The Key Features
- All of the existing Ninefold self service features available in Availability Zone 1 are available in Availability Zone 2 – via both the portal and the API
- Snapshot and copy your virtual servers from one Availability Zone to another
- Private inter-zone network connectivity to virtual servers (via multiple NICs), perfect for data replication or other inter-zone communication needs
- Separate IP address ranges available in each Availability Zone
- Physical firewall security protection available in both Availability Zones, with VPN options available
- Load Balance traffic to virtual servers residing in both Availability Zones (via Availability Zone 1)
Benefit from Using More than One Availability Zone
Get A Free Availability Zone Consultation
Ninefold’s second Availability Zone (AZ) is now live for customers looking to use multiple Zones in their cloud environments. We are committed to launching a third Zone in the last quarter of 2012. We want you to enjoy uninterrupted service and have the best possible experience when hosting your solution on the Ninefold platform.
Availability Zones are a key feature of public clouds that you would be amiss not to make use of when hosting your production systems. An AZ is a physically separated set of infrastructure; it is built using separate firewalls, switches, load balancers, servers, storage, power feeds and internet routers, and is designed to be isolated from failures in other Availability Zones. An AZ may be located in the same data centre (perhaps on a different floor) or in a different data centre entirely.
To help you get going we are offering a free consultation; assisting you to architect and design your solution to take advantage of multiple AZs with a view to minimising the risk of your service experiencing any downtime. With proper design, the cloud can be amazingly resilient and the use of multiple AZs is key to ensuring that an unexpected outage (or simply scheduled maintenance) in one AZ won’t from impact the availability of your website, application or service.