Clusters

[Highland]

Our business has gone through the roof and I'm looking into a cluster environment for our websites (we made the Inc 500 this year). I've been quoting out some people for a cluster and I've run into some interesting things. I'd appreciate any feedback on this you might have.

So far I've quoted Planet Northstar, Peer One and Rackspace. Peer One is the low price now and they've quoted me on a database cluster (RHEL 5) using a fiber-based SAN and GFS (never heard of that one). GFS is apparently for clusters. The other two are simpler with a load balancer, 2 web servers and a single database server. All have a hardware firewall and roughly the same level of support (though Peer One seems to be a bit lighter in that dept but that could just be my impression of them).

Any suggestions? Anyone I should look into for this that I missed? Still kinda new to this but I know we're going to need the scalability next year. I'm about done with the bidding process and will be pitching this to management probably next week.

Thanks

[npavlidis]

sound intresting could you post some more details on the offers they did?
gfs is a cluster file system from redhat http://www.redhat.com/gfs/ sounds good (never tried it) here we got Beowulf though (never touched that either)

looking forward for more info on the subject

[michiganmedia]

I would be interested too in finding out what solution your going to choose.

What billing system do you plan to use with your cluster?

[Highland]

No billing system here. We're an e-commerce company so all sites would be storefronts powered by a common database.

Leaning Peer One at this point since their basic cluster was the most cost effective.

[hostingguy]

are you doing any clustering with your Plesk servers (assuming you have any) ?

[Highland]

We're going to have to drop Plesk as it's apparently not cluster friendly. Not quite sure how we're going to manage this initially.