[ubuntu-uk] Redundency was Going back to the Dell deal...

[Mark Harrison]

Alan Pope wrote:
> Hi Mark,
>
> On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 11:00 +0100, Mark Harrison wrote:
>   
>>  Hardware load balancer tend to give the twin 
>> benefits of resilience and performance.
>>
>>     
>
> ..and another single point of failure. :)
>
> Cheers,
>   
> Al.
Al,

Yeah - that's why I've (in the past) used a pair of them with 
heart-beating between them.

Sadly, that MORE than doubles the cost, since the heartbeating 
functionality tends to be added-cost option.

.... and before anyone says "Cost, Mark? Surely you could use an 
additional pair of multi-homed Ubuntu boxes with XXX package running 
between them for sticky load balancing", I know I could in principle.... 
but I also know that I've run Cisco (Arrowpoint) loadbalancers for 
literally YEARS with zero maintenance, and 100% reliability across quite 
big webhead clusters ...

I have that level of confidence in Ubuntu server for running webheads 
and database clusters... but not for "network infrastructure boxes" (yet.)


Others may have a different opinion, and if they're prepared to 
underwrite (with funds lodged in an escrow account) my company's loss of 
income were we to have any downtime because of an Ubuntu failure, I'm 
willing to read their support proposals :-)



Mark