Server Types

We define five tiers of servers. No product requires all five. Five are the maximum. A product will likely have several servers for different purposes in each tier.

• Prototype (proto): In ISDA's colocation rack. Defined as temporary, try-out, crash-and-burn systems.
• Development: Virtualized via Server Operations' virtualization service. The environment for developers to perform their project work.
• Test: Virtualized via Server Operaions virtualization service. The environment for internal ISDA testing.
• Staging: Real production hardware via Server Operations standard offerings. For products that require it, this is for external developers or other end-users to test their integration. ISDA treats these as production. The configuration of this system is always identical to production.
• Production: Real production hardware via Server Operatons standard offerings. This is the live system.

Note: For products that do not require staging, tiers, "test" will match the production configuration and all other requirements for a staging system, and IPS will not requisition a virtualized test environment.

Basic Naming Pattern

A hostname is composed of three call signs separated by hyphens. The last call sign is appended with a number to indicate the number of hosts in service for that tier. It ends up taking the form as \[product\] - \[tier\] - \[type\]\[number\], for instance "cms - dev - wcm1" or "map - prod - ws1". Each call sign is 2 to 5 characters.

Product Calls Signs

Production Servers

• Wiki Markup
  Naming Convention: \[product\]-prod-\[service\].mit.edu. Example: map-prod-ws1.mit.edu

• Server Ops maintained physical hardware. No virtualization.
• Assume that each service requires at least two load-balanced servers.

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Prototype servers are on ISDA's colocation rack. Prototypes are designed to crash and burn so IPS selected a very generic namespace to avoid the overhead of requesting new names from server operations on a regular basis.

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