WANTED: Linux/Open-Source-friendly co-location service in Ottawa (Virtual Servers)

Hi all.  I am new to the OCLUG list having just moved here from
Saskatchewan
and am looking forward to the next meeting when I can meet many of you. 

I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 on my personal laptop and FedoraCore 8 on my
work machine,
in case you are wondering...

I thought I'd send this out to the Linux/open-source community in
Ottawa, because
ideally the vendor we choose will be friendly to that approach, which is
our own at
my organization, the Canadian Mathematical Society. 

We are looking for co-location using virtual servers with sufficient
hardware and
network redundancy so that we don't have to "think about hardware" anymore.

If you run such an operation or have a recommendation (we're a
non-profit, so
high-end/high-cost is not viable), then please let me know.

Here's what we are looking for from our vendor:

A Linux-friendly Virtual Hosting (OS, not just Apache virtual host)
provider who
can deliver us sufficient x64  processing power, memory and disk in an
environment where unplanned downtime due to hardware failures is minimized.
Ideally, hardware errors (from power supply failures and disk crashes to
lightning
strikes) would require no more than a "reboot to other hardware" with
very small
downtime. This may possibly be as one of many virtual servers in a "RAIS"
(redundant array of inexpensive servers) environment managed by the vendor

We would need exclusive use of the virtual host (not the physical host)
so that we would manage all the software and OS running there. This
would include items as specific as OS upgrades, kernel modules, disk
partitioning using virtual disks, etc.

In short, the vendor manages the hardware, we manage the software.

The vendor would guarantee that hardware problems would be detected and
resolved in a short time (matter of hours or less) through the server
pool with no or minimal data loss.  Obviously the servers would need
to be in a physically-secure setting.

Currently we are using a XEN Enterprise virtualization engine on a
four-processor x64 box with lots of RAM and RAID 1 disk protection,
using APC power management. Our "guest" virtual servers run under
CentOs (Redhat). The services we host are (1) Apache web servers with
several
extensions, (2) PostGreSQL and MySQL database servers, (3) DNS services,
but we are looking at extending this list of activities.

That's about it.  I can discuss in more details with anyone offering
this kind
of thing.

Cheers,
Steve La Rocque
CMS E-Services

[email protected] | [email protected]


-- 
OCLUG general discussion list
[email protected]
http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/oclug