Introduction
Businesses of all sizes must take backup and disaster recovery seriously. As companies grow and data becomes more and more prevalent, users of all types, either internal or external, require access to all this information. This is essential at a time when even the smallest business may find operations impossible with any single point of failure. With the launch of MS SQL Server 2005, MS SQL Servers are becoming increasingly popular for use in mission critical environments. With such important dependencies on software solutions, recovering from failures is crucial for business continuity.
To initiate movement towards redundancy and failure protection, Microsoft offers SQL Server Log Shipping (SQL Server 2000 and 2005) and SQL Server Database Mirroring (SQL Server 2005) in its core products. In addition to Microsoft, third party vendors, including Microsoft Gold Certified Partners such as Sonasoft, provide enhanced software solutions that simplify disaster recovery scenarios through easy to use Management Console and automating most of the manual steps. These components are focused on minimizing downtime while maximizing data retention in the event of catastrophic failure.
High Availability So Continue reading »
When you start a project, shared or dedicated servers may seem perfect to suit your requirements. You host your website, email accounts and database on one server and kick start your online business.
As your business grows, more and more things may be needed from your web hosting. Instead of 10 email accounts, now you need 50 or more emails because your team has grown. You might require Virtual Private Networks to stay connected with your team members around the clock.
More importantly, you cannot afford a second of down time. Consistency, uninterrupted service, back up and recovery are factors that you need in order to offer seamless service to your customers.
Clustered load balanced hosting is what you need to manage and synchronize all your web activities effectively. This type of hosting is often referred as complex hosting. Though the technology is complex, there is nothing to get panicky with regards to technical complexities. Rest assured that your hosting service provider will help you set up your multiple dedicated servers in clustered and load balanced format where needed.
Benefits of clustered hosting
Clustered hosting eliminates the limitations of shared hosting. It allows your we Continue reading »
Before you can talk about differences between clustering and load balancing, and there are more than a few, you’ve got to get the definitions straight. Clustering is often understood to mean the capability of some software to provide load balancing services, and load balancing is often used as a synonym for a hardware- or third-party-software-based solution.
In practice, clustering is usually used with application servers like IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and Oracle AS (10g). Also being used in that environment are load balancing features found in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) like BIG-IP. (For simplicity, we will talk about clustering versus ADC approaches.)
Scalability, horizontally speaking
There are hardware load balancers, of course, but there we talk about pools or farms, the server groupings where application requests get distributed. It is in the software world that the term cluster is applied to that same group.
Clustering will typically convert one instance of an application server to a master controller, then process/distribute requests to multiple instances using such industry standard algorithms as round robin, weighted round robin or least connections. Clustering is similar to load balancing in that it has horizontal scalability, a nearly transparent way to add additional instances of application servers for increased capacity or response time performance. To ensure that an instance is actually availab Continue reading »