Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 13:25:50 -1000 From: Clifton Royston <cliftonr@lava.net> To: "Rouzer, Charles A (Chuck)" <car@vitalit.com> Cc: freebsd-cluster@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: freebsd cluster target market Message-ID: <20030110132550.A18143@lava.net> In-Reply-To: <000901c2b8ef$57e4eb70$0201000a@LAPTOP>; from car@vitalit.com on Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 04:29:17PM -0500 References: <000901c2b8ef$57e4eb70$0201000a@LAPTOP>
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On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 04:29:17PM -0500, Rouzer, Charles A (Chuck) wrote:
> Is it fair to say that FreeBSD Clustering may gain adoption more quickly
> if designed for the hosting market as that seems to be its target market?
> These functions would also benefit other cluster applications.
>
> Seamless process migration could be a great benefit for this area.
>
> Next in line would probably be a more appropriate network file system.
>
> Can anyone offer the status of any ports or work done to provide these
> clustering abilities?
Really the thing that would appeal to me is a clustered solution that
works for very highly reliable and indefinitely scalable mail delivery
(SMTP) and user mailbox access (POP/IMAP.) This is one of the hardest,
klunkiest, most expensive problems to solve right now.
Note that this requires that N servers can engage in concurrent
read/write access to the same file system while it remains coherent
across all of them.
The best available solution at present seems to be a load-balancer in
front of a cluster of servers running appropriately chosen MTA and
POP/IMAP daemons, accessing user mail-stores in maildir format on
high-end NFS servers (NFS appliance type, e.g. NetApp) which are
configured in pairs for fail-over. The kind of stuff talked about in
Ward Christensen or Brad Knowles' papers. This is pretty expensive to
build due to the NFS component. At a SWAG, it's $100K-200K and up from
there for just a few servers' worth of cluster.
Hosting of dynamic web content is very similar in problem space.
Hosting of static content is easy by comparison, because you can
simply replicate the data.
-- Clifton
--
Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect -- cliftonr@lava.net
"If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can't catch you."
"What's the Specialist?" Samantha says.
"The Specialist wears a hat," says the babysitter. "The hat makes noises."
She doesn't say anything else.
Kelly Link, _The Specialist's Hat_
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