“Don’t want to rely upon a single-server point of failure, no
matter how many redundant subsystems it has or how well its SMP
works? Join the crowd. Clustering, an old technology solution, is
reemerging as the answer for high-availability e-commerce and Web
sites. TurboLinux’s TurboCluster Server 4.0 is one of the latest
attempts to update clustering for the Web generation….”
“In our tests, using a pair of old Compaq 100MHz Pentium
systems with 48MB of RAM, we saw Web and ftp file-serving
performance that was 34 percent better than the two systems running
independently of each other. While the raw results were
nothing spectacular, the lesson that clustering can produce better
performance is one that any company will be happy to learn.”
“TurboCluster also provides the usual assortment of clustering
goodies. These include dynamic load balancing, service monitoring
and automatic IP fail-over. We found that the system would
load-balance without user intervention. We tried this out by
loading one of the cluster nodes down with the KDE GUI and
WordPerfect 8 running in the foreground. The Web and ftp server
load moved smoothly to its idling brother and, when the GUI and
application were taken down, the Internet services load quickly was
shared out between the two systems.”