On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Dejan Muhamedagic wrote:

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 01:16:31AM +0200, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
On 2008-06-03T16:35:22, "Hildebrand, Nils, 232" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

- [Quality not important for hardware?]
I think the truth is somewhere in between. If you have a cluster it is
not that important if a node goes down (depending on how available your
services have to be).

Right, but telling customers to save on hardware because they are
getting clustering is, uhm, not something I'd advocate ;-)

Indeed. Clusters are not a replacement for good hardware. A
perfect cluster is one which is never exercised (unless when
testing) ;-)

I will disagree with this. I've seed companies spend insane amounts of money on hardware that is internally redundant (to the point of having nultiple motherboards and cpus running in lock-step and periodicly cross-checking their results) when a cluster on much cheaper hardware would have been the right thing to do.

and ignoring this extreme case it can still be better (both in reliability and in cost) to buy 2 single-drive/single-power boxes and set them up in a cluster then to buy 1 fully redundant box, and with a good cluster implementation (like heartbeat) the difference in total reliability between a cluster build from two fo the cheap boxes and one built with two of the expensive boxes can be very small.

I'm asuming for the example above that both the 'cheap' and 'expensive' boxes are purchased from the same company.

a perfect cluster is not one that is never excercised, it's one that provides uninterrupted service to it's clients. A cluster can do this in the face of many upgrades (including hardware forklift upgrades, OS upgrades, kernel upgrades, reboots, etc) that no single box solution can match, no matter how much more you spend on the hardware.

David Lang
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