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Clustering vs. Fault-Tolerant Servers
mstansberry writes "According to SearchDataCenter.com fault-tolerant server vendors say the majority of hardware and software makers have pushed clustering as a high-availability option because it sells more hardware and software licenses. Fault-tolerant servers pack redundant components such as power supply and storage into a single box, while clustering involves the networking of multiple, standard servers used as failover machines." Perhaps some readers on the front lines can shed a bit more light on the debate based on both proprietary and Linux-based approaches.
Clustering provides you with Fault Tollerant OS/Applications. A single server with tons of redundant bits, doesn't help you if the OS or Applications that it servers get borked.
Windows Server 2003 actually supports two different types of clustering. One is called network load balancing, which enables up to 32 clustered servers to run a high-demand application to prevent a single server from being bogged down. If one of the servers in the cluster fails, then the other servers instantly pick up the slack.
Network load balancing has been most often used with Web servers, which tend to use fairly static code and require little data replication. If a clustered web site needs more performance than what the cluster is currently providing, additional servers can be instantaneously added to the cluster. Once the cluster reaches the 32-server limit, you can further expand the cluster by creating a second cluster and then using round-robin DNS to divide traffic between the two clusters.
The other type of clustering that Windows Server 2003 supports by default is often referred to simply as clustering. The idea behind this type of clustering is that two or more servers share a common hard disk. All of the servers in the cluster run the same application and reference the same data on the same disk. Only one of the servers actually does the work. The other servers constantly check to make sure that the primary server is online. If the primary server does not respond, then the secondary server takes over.
This type of clustering doesn't really give you any kind of performance gain. Instead, it gives you fault tolerance and enables you to perform rolling upgrades. (A server can be taken offline for upgrade without disrupting users.) In Windows 2000 Advanced Server, only two servers could be clustered together in this way (four servers in Windows 2000 Datacenter Edition). In Windows Server 2003, though, the limit has been raised to eight servers. Microsoft offers this as a solution to long-distance fault tolerance when used in conjunction with the iSCSI protocol (SCSI over IP).
Fault tolerance gets you a machine that keeps running in the face of hardware failures and maintenance. The switchover time is arguably negligible.
Clustering gets you a set of services that keep running in the face of hardware failures and maintenance. The switchover time can range from negligible to huge depending on the application involved.
However, clustering also helps you to solve other problems, including scaling, software failures, software upgrades, A-B testing (running different versions side by side), major hardware upgrades, and even data center relocations.
Clustering tends to require a lot more local knowledge to get right.
So if you narrow the problem definition to hardware only, they solve the same class of problems. But when you broaden it to the full range of what clustering offers you find a greater opportunity for cost savings - because one technique is covering multiple needs.
Having built both true high-reliability fault-tolerant devices and clustered systems, I don't see any fundamental theoretical difference. In both cases, you have redundant hardware capacity in place, theoretically to allow you to tolerate the failure of a certain amount of your hardware (and, sometimes, your software) for a certain amount of time. Neither option guards you against failures outside of the cluster or FT system box. Neither one is a panacea. Both are sold as snake-oil insurance against "badness".
In a single fault-tolerant box, you generally have environmental monitoring, careful attention to error detection, and automatic failover. You also have customer-replaceable units for failure-prone components, utiilties for managing all of the redundancy, and a fancy nameplate. In exchange for that, you have more complexity, more cost, serious custom hardware and software modifications, and often (but not always) performance constraints.
In a clustered system, you treat each individual server as a failure unit. Good fault detection is a challenge, especially for damaging but non-catastrophic failure, but it's much easier to configure a given level of redundancy and it's easier to take care of environmental problems like building power (or water in the second floor) -- you just configure part of the cluster a longer distance away.
Where clustering is inadequate is when you have a single mission-critical system where any failure is disaster (like flight-control avionics or nuclear power plant monitoring). There are applications where there's no substitute for redundant design, locked-clock processors and "voting" hardware, and all of the other low-level safeguards you can use.
For Web applications, however, where a certain sloppiness is tolerable, and where the advantages of load balancing, off-the-shelf hardware and software, and system administration that doesn't require an EE with obsessive-compulsive disorder, clusters are the natural solution.
The fact that you get to sell more licenses for the software is just gravy.
What you wrote is really ignorant (which, modded on /., translates to Insightful).
1. (because I have yet to meet a clustering DB solution that didnt suck).
Where do you live? In Ruanda?
Perhaps you have heard of Oracle RAC. And there are other very good clustering solutions for DBMS.
2. one copy of Debian + Apache + MySQL + Perl or 200 copies
mySQL isn't enterprise-reliable even in stand-alone configuration, let alone clustering. I can't believe this...
3. And windows doesnt support clustering yet - in any decent way shape or form, I dont see the problem here.
Hah, hah! Enough said.
And also - what's it to you? If Microsoft (in your view) had a good clustering solution, you'd lose sleep over that?
When you're biased like that, no wonder you can't have a quality, unbiased opinion on this topic.
Let me preface this by saying I'm the Enterprise IT Manager for a large, Big-10 University. "Enterprise" means I am responsible for all servers that run the University, not just a small department. My userbase is 70,000+ students, and somewhere between 15,000-20,000 faculty and staff.
We run a variety of hardware platforms, including a large Linux deployment. Yes, it really does depend on what you want to do with that server, before you can decide to go with a bunch of servers behind a load balancer v. a larger, fault-tolerant server.
For our production web servers (PeopleSoft, web registration, etc.) we run a bunch of cheap servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and we distribute them across two data centers (for redundancy.) We run a load balancer in front of them, so that users access one URL, and the load balancer automagically distributes traffic to the servers on both data centers. For a lightly-used application, we may only run 2 web servers. For heavily-used applications (web registration) we run 5 web servers. Those are IBM x-series now, but we are in the process of moving to IBM BladeCenters.
With multiple servers in production, I can lose any single web server and not experience downtime on the application. We usually only have a single PSU in each server, because there's no point in the extra expense when we have redundancy at the server level. And because we've split our web servers across two data centers, I can actually lose an entire data center and only experience slow response time on the application. (Note to the paranoid: while the data centers are only 1.4miles apart, they are on separate power grids, etc. The other back-end infrastructure is also split between data centers.) We run a lot of sites behind load balancers, so we can afford to have a separate load balancer pair at each site (which can provide backup to each other.)
However, for large applications we may use a single fault-tolerant Linux server. For example, we used to do this with a database server. Multiple power supplies, multiple network connections, RAID storage, etc. To be honest, though, we tend to run databases on "big iron" hardware such as Sun SPARC (E25000, V890, etc.) and IBM p-series. We don't have any Linux database servers left, but that's not because Linux wasn't up to the task (our DBAs preferred to have the same platform for all databases, to make debugging and knowledge-sharing easier.)
In a few cases, we have a third tier. If the application is low-priority (i.e. a development server) and/or low-volume (i.e. a web site that doesn't get much traffic), we run a single server for that. The server is a cheap IBM x-series box running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, usually with no built-in redundancy.
Yes, for us Linux has been able to play along quite nicely with the "big iron" UNIX systems. We've run Linux at the Enterprise level since 1998 or 1999, and Linux is definitely considered part of our Enterprise solution.
Most successful strategies I've heard of involve building a system out of parts that you know can't fail, and then designing the system around the failure of the parts that you know can't fail.
I am officially gone from