Re: HA without a cluster

Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1076371385.512175_at_yasure>...

> Hardly. What do you think is running Amazon.com and many of the other
> high volume 7x24x365 web sites?
>
> Right now Amazon has gotten rid of all but a few SuperDomes. Everything
> else is running on Linux clusters.

Daniel, I was not talking about RAC at all! Mark was not talking about RAC neither. He asked about use of cluster in active-passive configuration with no comercial cluster software (such as Legato AAM or SunCluster) and remount filesystem in a case of failure). This can be accomplished and I saw few configurations like this. There are free softwares that can offer some subset of functionality and together with some shell scripting you can create your passive-active cluster for free. However, even linux guys who tried this told me that there are few gotchas that you should be aware of. I saw a working configuration for a mail server or an internet gate, but I would strongly oppose using this for a database server, because a database with its heavy writes are always a cluster nightmare. Just one small suggestion at the end. Do not advocate usage of RAC with examples of high volume web sites. The same reasoning is used by MySQL freaks while throwing dirt at ("unnecessary expensive") Oracle and they are (to some extent) right. Web sites are very read oriented environments so even big sites do not need really need a well performing database. That's the reason why MySQL (with great reads and terrible writes) is so popular in this business.

--
Dusan Bolek

Email: spambin_at_seznam.cz
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Sorry, but it's a tough time.