[lug] [O/T]Web Server Fault Tolerance Devices

Nate Duehr nate at natetech.com
Tue Sep 19 01:33:26 MDT 2000


Alteon 
Radware
Cisco (LocalDirector)
Arrowpoint
BigIP/F5 Systems

...etc etc etc... there are others...

If you're dead-set on a hardware solution (good idea I think), the
Alteon's and Cisco's are top-notch, and the price tags match.  Alteon
can handle Gig Ethernet without too much trouble.  F5 claims to, but I'm
still skeptical of a PC architecture doing that on an overclocked PCI
bus.  I have customers that use them, so I guess we'll find out.  Their
early machines claimed 100Mb/s performance and couldn't really do more
than 70 or so.  Some of that can be blamed on Ethernet and some on the
box itself, but Alteons and LocalDirectors could push faster.

Other opinions:  Radware sucks, but works for very low-volume sites.
BigIP is nothing more than a fancy BSD box with some custom code... if
you're going to go that route, just build one yourself if you have the
skills.  You'll end up with something more secure anyway.

Of course, if you're not pushing that much bandwidth and need only
redundancy of N+1 type for your servers (two servers, but one could
handle the full load), look into stuff like the Linux Virtual Server
project and the linux-ha.org site for High-Availability linux solutions.

Just to get us back on the topic of Linux...

On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 04:45:38PM -0600, George Sexton wrote:
> Does anyone know who manufactures "director" devices. That is devices that
> take http requests for a specific address and routes them to multiple
> possible web servers? I am really interested in a hardware level device
> rather than a clustering approach. Any leads would be appreciated....
> 
> George Sexton
> MH Software, Inc.
> Voice: 303 438 9585
> http://www.mhsoftware.com
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>

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