Re: What's the latest thinking of the besttwo or threewebdevelopment languages/environ...

Thanks, Ralph. I was going to reply here, but I'm glad you beat me to it.

The idea that having multiple servers somehow magically provides redundancy is pretty silly. Instead, as you point out, it actually provides *multiple* failure points. That is, unless each of those servers also has redundancy, at which point you're beginning to get silly amounts of hardware.

And if those multiple applications are sharing data, that means that either: every request for data goes over the network, or the data is redundant across all the servers. The former is a performance nightmare, the latter is an administration (and cost) overhead.

The server farm model is a pretty poor idea from an enterprise standpoint, except in the case of something like Google, with a single application spread among a gazillion servers. Notice how the term "grid computing" has pretty much disappeared? That's because it's a bad idea for most applications. (Not to mention it's not "green" <grin>).

Joe

And if any of multiple servers goes down for same reason, you are in better shape to continue operations because why?

because you have redundancy for multiple servers? why is that easier / better than redundancy for one server?

there is no balance, there is only multiple points of failure, often with a mix of more fragile OS'es when Windows is involved.

rd


Walden H. Leverich wrote:

One the advantages of having an as/400 is that you only need one box.

True. But you need to balance that against the fact that one of the
disadvantages of having an as/400 is you only have one box. Upgrading?
Patching? Crashed? You're entire enterprise is offline. Smart?