[theforum] Results Discussion (was Re: Results (was Re: RFV:ServerMatrix Hosting for l.e.o))

William Anderson neuro at well.com
Thu Jun 10 03:32:40 CDT 2004


Judah McAuley wrote:
> [contentious 'failover' snippage]
> 
> With a place like server matrix (which has 6 major backbone connections) 
> you can likely set it up so that each box is on a different network 
> segment. If they are attached to different switches, on different vlans, 
> then that is 99% of the seperation you'd get having the two boxes in 
> seperate buildings. 

Nameserver failover should require servers in different geographic 
locations, preferably different states or countries.  When I roll out 
nameservers, I try to have one or two in Telehouse Docklands, one in the US 
or Canada, and one anywhere else in the globe.  Having our nameservice 
provided solely from one network provider, regardless of their peering, 
makes me feel ill.

 > As for weo, you'll notice that a) I brought that up
> as a potential confounding factor and b) on the irc channel martin and I 
> just went over load balancing/replication issues for Zope (should we 
> choose to go that route). Considering that we don't even have a proposal 
> for what a migrated weo CMS would run under, I don't think its 
> unreasonable to propose load balancing/failover as a spec for a new weo 
> setup. Do you?
> 
> So, yes, it has been thought out. Thanks :)

Has it?  In the abscence of hard statistics, we don't know what level of 
traffic we deal with a day, and we don't know what level of balancing we 
really need.  I'd suggest that a more suitable strategy for an organisation 
of our size and budget would be to have a fast, fast, fast server somewhere 
well connected which can do the job amply with capacity to spare in scads, 
with a cheap, less able but usable cold or warm standby available at another 
geographic location.  Why skimp on the box that will serve us 99.999% of the 
time?  Do Servermatrix not provide warranties on their equipment?  Is an 
hourly/daily rsync to a virtual host (i.e. a uml "box" such as Memset and 
Bytemark provide) after our budget has properly settled not out of the question?

-- 
_ __/|  William Anderson      | Brodie: The Force is strong with this one
\`O_o'  neuro at well dot com |    Jay: Dude, don't encourage him
=(_ _)= http://neuro.me.uk/   |  -- Mallrats, (1995)
    U  - Thhbt! GPG 0xFA5F1100 |


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