AppLogic Hardware Configuration

An AppLogic grid consists of two or more commodity servers connected via an Ethernet network. Each server has two Ethernet ports, a gigabit port which is connected to a network that forms the grid backbone, and a second port connected to the rest of the datacenter and/or the public Internet. The backbone network is private, secure and provides non-blocking gigabit connectivity between any two servers.

A standard AppLogic software image is installed on each server before adding it to the grid. One of the servers is designated as a grid controller and runs the management portion of the system. The operator manages the grid by accessing the controller through a secure browser connection.

You can use almost any commodity server in an AppLogic grid. They must have at least an Intel P4 or a compatible AMD processor running at 1GHz or better, at least 512MB of RAM, 80GB of ATA/SATA storage one gigabit Ethernet interfaces for the backbone and another Ethernet interface for the public network. When running web applications, larger hard disks and more memory generally improve performance more than raw CPU speed. Shared storage, such as SAN, NAS or a common file system is not required - AppLogic implements a shared, mirrored storage pool using the hard disks of the servers in the grid.

For efficient operations in hosting environments, AppLogic can be configured so that as many as 32 separate, independent AppLogic grids share the same backbone network. This makes it easy to implement "virtual private datacenters" using reasonably-sized (and priced) gigabit Ethernet switches.

Finally, since AppLogic distributes applications automatically and dynamically across the grid, it is not necessary to use enterpirse class servers when building AppLogic grids. Due to factors such as limitations on memory bus and peripheral bus throughput, a larger number of commodity servers is quite likely to outperform a similarly priced grid built from higher-priced machines.