Author: JT Smith
The Apache HTTP server has seen wide acceptance and unparalleled popularity as an open-source product powering over 18 million Web sites. Covalent Enterprise Ready Server will further fuel this adoption by providing functionality much needed by large corporations wishing to make use of Apache. Covalent has enhanced Apache in three key areas: manageability, security and reliability.
“As more and more companies have relied on the Web server as their presentation layer, the management of that layer has grown increasingly cumbersome,†said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president, system software research at IDC. “Covalent’s Enterprise Ready Server is likely to make Apache more attractive to large organizations who are bringing together multiple Web-centric solutions and creating a more unified environment.â€
Highlights of Covalent Enterprise Ready Server include:
· The first one-to-many management portal for configuring, managing, and monitoring hundreds of Apache servers and thousands of virtual hosts.
· Vastly improved Apache performance on both UNIX and Windows operating systems.
· The first comprehensive, programmatic authentication and authorization services for Apache (which integrates into a wide range of existing infrastructures).
· The first consolidated logging service over multiple servers and multiple types of content.
· Multi-protocol content serving capabilities, including support for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, with shared services across all of those protocols.
“Covalent Enterprise Ready Server is for those who’ve been dying to replace their slow, buggy, and insecure traditional Web server software with something truly worthy of the term ‘Enterprise’,†said Brian Behlendorf, president of the Apache Software Foundation and founder and chief technology officer of CollabNet. “Covalent ERS brings together the reliability, flexibility, and security of the Apache 2.0 Web server platform with the manageability, integration, and ease of administration that enterprise software deployments require.â€
Reducing Operational Complexity
Operations groups at large enterprises face an increasingly complex information technology landscape. On the one hand, they are seeing a vast rise in the number of Web servers they must manage. As mission critical applications have increasingly relied on the Web as their client front end, IT groups have been left to manage this ever-growing and ever more important aspect of their company’s business. On the other hand, as these groups simultaneously experience server proliferation, they are also faced with flat or shrinking headcounts, forcing them to manage more and more servers – on average up to 350 Web servers – with the same or fewer personnel. Covalent, after frequently encountering this scenario with its enterprise customers, designed and built Enterprise Ready Server to alleviate these pain points.
Benefits of Enterprise Ready Server
Covalent has focused its efforts on enhancing the already powerful Apache 2.0 platform in three key areas: manageability, security and reliability. The benefits of these enhancements include:
· Manageability – Covalent’s Enterprise Ready Server lowers the cost of managing and maintaining complex Internet infrastructures through the advanced Covalent Management Portal (CMP), a centralized management tool for deploying, configuring, controlling and monitoring Apache Web servers and virtual hosts. A single administrator can now manage, configure, and install hundreds of Web servers and virtual hosts located in dozens of data centers from a central location.
· Security – Covalent ERS utilizes the most secure SSL encryption technology available—the RSA B-safe libraries. Covalent ERS enhances Apache’s standard authentication and authorization capabilities. It combines the most requested functionality of several authentication modules and provides a rich set of authentication options, including ANON, DB, Oracle, LDAP, NIS and several others.
· Reliability – Covalent’s Logging Services provide the first real-time, shared infrastructure environment for monitoring and analyzing Web usage. Covalent Logging Services makes it easy to get a complete and consolidated view of multi-server environments, no matter where the servers reside. The Logging Service also ensures data integrity across restarts and downtimes.
Apache 2.0
Covalent Enterprise Ready Server is based on the secure and flexible Apache 2.0 platform. Apache 2.0 is HTTP 1.1 compliant and includes support for distributed authoring and versioning; proxying and caching; IP and named-based virtual hosting; and Java, Perl, and PHP applications. Apache 2.0 also contains a completely new and innovative internal processing architecture. Apache’s Multi Processing Module (MPM) lets administrators choose between a stable parent-child process model and a hybrid prefork/threaded model. The Apache Portable Runtime feature also ensures greatly increased performance on all platforms, most notably Windows.
What’s Included
Covalent Enterprise Ready Server includes the complete binary for Apache 2.0, Tomcat 4.0 Java server, Covalent Management Portal, Covalent User Tracking, Covalent Logging Services, Covalent Authorization and Authentication Services, Covalent SSL, Covalent FTP, Covalent SNMP, PHP and mod_perl.
Platforms, Pricing and Availability
Covalent ERS will initially ship on Solaris, Linux, HPUX and Windows for $1,495 per CPU. Covalent Enterprise Ready Server is available today from Covalent’s direct sales force at 800/444-1935.
About Covalent Technologies, Inc.
Covalent was founded in 1998 by Randy Terbush, one of the eight developers who originally started the Apache Web Server project. Today, Covalent is the leader in products and services for Apache. Funded by leading venture capital investors including Sequoia Capital and Granite Ventures, Covalent is the only company offering a comprehensive “enterprise-ready†solution for Apache. Companies such as Lucent Technologies, Dow Jones and others depend on Covalent for their Apache Web Server infrastructure. More information about the company can be found at www.covalent.net.”
