Funding Cyrus High Availability

[Michael Loftis]

--On Thursday, September 16, 2004 22:14 -0400 Earl Shannon 
<Earl_Shannon at ncsu.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
>
>> Question:   Are people looking at this as both redundancy and
>> performance, or just redundance?
>
>
> My $0.02 worth. Performance gains can be found the traditional way, ie,
> faster hardware, etc.Our biggest need is for redundance. If something
> goes wrong on one machine we still need to be able to let users use email.

Cyrus already has this solved via MURDER, but FWIW, more smaller boxes 
isolate failures more effectively than one big box, also price/performance 
is still better at a certain size for any platform, and going up higher on 
the performance curve has HUGE price jumps.

There's also the cost of administering multiple separate boxes to think 
about but carefully planned, this can be managed rather easily.

The whole 'throw bigger and bigger boxen' at it method of 'scaling' doesn't 
scale.  You hit the wall.  One box can only do so much, granted you can 
spend LOTS of money and get pretty big boxes, but at some point it becomes 
ludicrous -- who would use a Sun E10k/E15k and a whole Symmetrix DMX for 
just mail?  (and I'm excluding companies like AOL and IBM who actually can 
afford it and would maybe have a reason to scale to that size)...

Price/Performance has a curve associated with it, most of us can't afford 
to always stay at the top end of the curve, and have to be at the middle. 
Further, does it make sense to re-invest in equipment every year to 
maintain growth?  No, you should be able to expand, add another box, or 
two, and that scales fairly well.  Better than the single big box approach.


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