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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