Geographically separated load balancers?

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Neil Aggarwal wrote:

> Joe:
>
> The servers will be in datacenters that I lease space from.
> It looks like I will need cooperation from both of those
> datacenters to make this work.  I am not sure they would
> be willing to do that.
>
> Is this something datacenters would normally work with
> me on or is it beyond the norm?

having geographically dispersed servers is routine. People 
want this to handle local failures and so clients will get a 
machine near them on the internet. Usually this is the big 
boys with lots of money, so they have their own data centers 
all over the place or rent space from ISPs that have data 
centers all over the place. If you go talk to two small ISPs 
in two different locations, you'll find they have their 
block of IPs and they can't use someone else's IP (the VIP) 
to handle a failover elsewhere. I think the chances of you 
getting cooperation for just two boxes are small even if 
they can do it.

You should be able to get what you want if you look at your 
specs again. Individual ISP's/datacenters loose routing once 
or twice a year despite redundant links to the outside. 
However you can regard them as reliable as it gets for 
finite money. So let's assume the setup you have at any one 
site is reliable (you can handle failover within your setup 
yourself). Why do you need geographically dispersed servers? 
To have the client close (network wise) to a server?

How a client in Ireland gets sent to a server in England 
while someone on the east coast of USA gets a server in 
NewYork I don't know. The machine name is the same in both 
cases. Anyone know how this is handled?

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
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