Ask the Experts: Making the transition from standalone servers to server clusters

"Kalyana Krishna Chadalavada, Director -- Systems & Technology at HPC Systems, Inc. responds: The best way to introduce clusters in to your infrastructure is to roll out a pilot implementation. In most cases, it is possible to start small and expand as needs grow. However, this is the view from a 1000 ft above the ground. There are a lot of applications that do support clustered configurations, databases have been the first to do so. File servers, email servers, web servers followed shortly after. For applications that are not cluster-aware themselves, load balancing can be achieved by introducing a new device like IP load balancers in to the network.

"The specifics of implementation will vary based on the goals you are trying to achieve. It is also important to note that not all services scale indefinitely as you scale the available resources. Simply put, adding 10 servers will not necessarily improve the performance by 10 times."

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