On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 10:20, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It sounds like you're referring to having a mirrored backup server for high availability; in the event that your primary server goes down. And that's fine.
Yep. At least that's what Microsoft and IBM use the term "cluster" for
(with exceptions like HPC, of course).
There may be many motivations for using server farms. Complex workloads tend to destabilize Windows over time, so farms become a means of managing that problem.
This is exactly the kind of FUD that doesn't help anyone.
Server farms are a way to scale CPU or static IO intensive workload
horizontally, while still providing redundancy. This is a very good
approach for web applications, as it keeps the cost low and provides
very high performance. It is unsuitable for OLTP workloads, and never
used there.
I'd rather deploy applications to IBM i libraries, and maybe to an additional mirrored server, and be done with it.
The architecture used to deploy an application should depend on what
exactly you want to deploy.
Imagine you want to run facebook: You'll needs lots of static
bandwidth for images and such, and lots of processing power for
rendering customized pages for each of the thousands of concurrent
users, located all across the globe.
Even if you have a 64 socket 595, you'll run out of CPU juice soon
enough. And if you need to apply PTFs, facebook will be down. So
you'll need two fully loaded 595, and they still won't be enough.
A better approach would be to use a central DB server (e.G. a
redundant pair of 570) frontended by lots of 520s running the
application.
Things change when you want to run an ERP application, which is very
OLTP heavy. Then, a redundant pair of 595 might make more sense.
The key is to use the right approach for the unique problem your
business is facing - running Facebook is massively different from
running an ERP application.
These key concepts don't even shift much even if you switch platforms
- if you want to run an OLTP heavy ERP on Windows, you're much better
of purchasing an IBM x3950 which can help you scale Windows to up to
96 cores (4 chassis at 4 sockets with 6 cores each).
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/enterprise/x3950m2/index.html
This that remind you of anything? The general concept behind the x3950
is almost the same as the one used for the Power 570.
midrange.com
