Geographically distant load balancing (er, I mean failover)

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Tue, 9 Jan 2007, Dan Brown wrote:

>
>
>> On Tuesday, January 09, 2007 Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
>> On Mon, 8 Jan 2007, Dan Brown wrote:
>>
>>> I am looking at setting up a geographically separated 
>>> set of directors to perform failover with a pair of 
>>> routers.

the usual reason for geographically dispersed servers is for 
lower latency for the local users (eg google has separate 
servers for local areas/countries).

You handle failures that must be handled quickly (<1min eg 
disks) locally and failures that can be recovered in 24hrs 
(eg backup/replication) off-site. Nowadays with RAID etc, 
gear doesn't fail a whole lot (except fans which fail about 
as often as disks here). Planned maintenance seems to be the 
main problem where I am - a bureaucrat insists that security 
patches be applied the instant they're released and the 
machine rebooted or else we'll be compromised that very day. 
Otherwise machines (and nowadays networks) just seem to stay 
up forever.

Joe



-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
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