UNIXY is pleased to announce the release of Fastlayer, the HTTP accelerator for the cloud. For more information, visit fastlayer.com

The Fastlayer concept sprung to life from the need to provide HTTP acceleration and caching to a growing base of clients running disparate platforms. The software is modeled to work as a dedicated appliance platform with multi-tenant capabilities. Fastlayer provides the software and the client allocates the hardware (or virtual machine). But allow me backtrack a bit and start from the beginning.

Several years ago, UNIXy, a fully managed hosting services firm, started offering Varnish Cache to clients as demand for such software grew immensely. A few years later, they built a limited set of tools to automate installation and support. UNIXy supports a large set of control panels. In fact, the firm supports all third party software. Support became even more challenging at that point.

Then comes the cPanel Varnish Plugin, which offered installation, management, and integration with the well known Web hosting control panel cPanel WHM. It was followed a few months later by the DirectAdmin Varnish Plugin; ad nauseam.

Fastlayer to the rescue

Here we are today having built Fastlayer. Third party application support is no longer a concern for clients that need acceleration and caching. Fastlayer acts as an acceleration layer and can host hundreds of host names (virtual hosts). It’s manageable and API-enabled so it’s programmable.

How to obtain Fastlayer

We are currently undergoing beta testing of the product with a diverse set of cloud operators,  Web service providers, and individuals. Fastlayer is always looking to reach out to more folks and organizations so be sure to contact us.

We’ve had very positive results accelerating XenForo with Varnish (in a cluster configuration). In terms of VCL, we’ve taken a slightly different approach but it results in better caching / acceleration. We’ve allocated a small per-user cache (logged in users), which makes XenForo pages load even faster than normal conditions. This reserved cache is rather transparent to the end user so no code changes are required. In fact, the acceleration we provide requires no modification to any XF files at all.

Static files, however, are stripped out of cookies in the Varnish VCL and served from the same cache area. The performance gains are tremendous. We’ve already published a Varnish plugin for cPanel and DirectAdmin that incorporates these tweaks. Feel free to read more about it here: http://www.unixy.net/varnish

Cheers

Update (2011-02-16): If you’re interested in running Varnish with cPanel, UNIXY has created a cPanel Varnish plugin. Our Varnish VCL configuration performs much better than Litespeed. Read more about it here: http://www.unixy.net/varnish

Update (2010-10-09): Should you be interested in a managed vBulletin dedicated server know that UNIXy has built a system that is ideal for those that want to run a lightening fast vBulletin forum. Visit the following product link:

https://www.unixy.net/secure/cart.php?a=add&pid=216

Varnish is an excellent Web accelerator that can be made to proxy requests in and out of a cluster of somewhat more fully fledged Web servers like Apache or Litespeed. It has some great features like its compiled language, called VCL, and C-like programming API.

Large vBulletin deployments tend to be heavy on CPU and memory due to PHP script processing. For a large vBulletin forum, we recommend a cluster of 5 physical servers with three of those running Xen virtualization. One of those servers will be dedicated to the MySQL master database. Three to be setup as “headless” PHP nodes and Varnish load balancing and failover. And finally one as the NFS file store. The three headless servers need to run Varnish in their own VM and Litespeed or Apache in their own VM similarly.

The varnish backend director functionality makes it ideal to balance incoming traffic across all PHP headless nodes. It makes the configuration scalable and plug and play especially when needing to scale out within hours. The challenge in this setup is in making Varnish work correctly with vBulletin. Otherwise, session problems will occur.

We have a lot to share on this implementation so keep checking this blog as we will post it all. In the next installment, we’ll go through our deployment of a large vBulletin forum for a customer. In the mean time, feel free to get in touch should you have a question or comment. If you are interested in us helping you accelerate your server, we have a page explaining the different technologies we deploy on our clients’ dedicated servers. Read up here: http://www.unixy.net/accelerate-your-server

Update: we are offering a Varnish configuration for vBulletin (3 & 4) for a one-time fee. We can also configure it free of charge should you decide to rent your fully managed dedicated server from UNIXY (http://www.unixy.net). Please contact us today to get your forum running with a blazing fast speed!

That’s all folks!