Penn: Technical Specifications

Highlights for:

Penn Web Server Technical Information

The www.upenn.edu service is hosted on a pair of fully redundant Sun Fire X4100 M2 systems running Red Hat Linux. Each has eight Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and 32 gigabytes of memory, and is connected to EMC Clarion Storage Area Network. The configuration is designed to survive the failure of any component, including the loss of an entire machine room, power grid, local network, or Internet connection

This highly redundant, survivable configuration is hosted in two data centers approximately five blocks apart. Each location houses one of the hosts and one side of the fully mirrored storage array, is served by separate power grids, and includes fully redundant power and HVAC systems. Data is replicated in real time between the two locations.

In addition to having redundant hardware we also utilize Akamai caching that will permit pages that have been cached by Akamai to be served in the event that we have a failure of both servers.

Apache 2.2.13 is the web server software.