Medikin's servers are powered by quad-core Intel Xeon processors with
multiple hot-swappable hard drives in RAID 1 configurations, dual
power supplies and up to 32 GB of RAM. Remote control of the servers
is maintained via KVM-over-IP switches. This enables systems
administrators to remotely access the servers at the BIOS level which
is helpful in case of any critical issues with the base operating
system.
VIRTUAL SERVERS
Medikin utilizes the open source Xen Hypervisor virtualization
technology to provision services to its clients via virtual servers
running the latest stable version of the Debian distribution of the
Linux open source operating system. Virtualization enables Medikin to
scale up very quickly and without interruption to existing services.
Virtualization provides many other benefits such as datacenter
flexibility, more efficient use of computing resources and greater
application security.
SYSTEMS MONITORING
Physical and virtual servers as well as critical services are
monitored 24X7 by a customized implementation of the open source
Nagios monitoring software. Alerts are sent to qualified on-call
engineers via email and SMS.
DATABASE SYSTEMS
The databases reside on servers dedicated exclusively for reading from
and writing to the database tables. Multiple database servers handle
the active client data, and standby servers are updated nightly to
provide fault tolerance at the database processing layer. Medikin
utilizes the most advanced open source database software - PostgreSQL
and MySQL, and the AFS file system for enhanced security, scalability
and efficiency.
DATA STORAGE
All client audio and document data as well as virtual server image and
code repository updates are backed up to a storage system consisting
of a large redundant array (RAID 5) of hot-swappable disks which
stripe the data across the drives to ensure continuity in case of a
disk failure. A secondary incremental backup is transmitted nightly
via VPN to a storage server in Medikin's secondary datacenter.
Off-site backup to fixed media such as tape or DVD is available upon
request.