<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META content="MSHTML 5.00.3103.1000" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#9e9e9e>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hello.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I've read this mailing list for some weeks and I
recognized I probably misunderstood the meaning of cluster. This mail is to
better understand what this word means and to ask something I really and
absolutely need.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In my wrong old idea, a cluster was a group of
computer doing something "together". This something could be anything: parallel
computing, load balancing for various kind of servers --i.e. web server--
and, this is what I needed, data replication.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I've seen a demo in which some Microsoft techies
had 2 Digital AlphaServers with Windows NT installed. These servers where used
as database servers: they had their separate array of disks and where used in
some form of load balancing.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>After some minutes of --boring-- demo, they
unplugged the power chord of one Digital without shutting down the system. On
the other Digital's monitor a popup said that the other system crashed so it had
to answer all the queries of the client. And everything went on without any kind
of problem.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>This is what I'd need to do: I need to have a
couple of machines --2 or 3 would be enough-- with real-time synchronization of
stored data. Load balancing isn't that important --I mainly use them as smb file
server-- but data replication is absolutely necessary. If a machine crashes or
hangs or any piece of hardware get out of oder, I need one of the other machines
do its job without anything to do for the users. And shared data must be
coherent on all the machines. Since I don't have very heavy network traffic,
it's ok to setup one machine as master and the other as slave, if this can help
me/us to setup this configuration.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I hope I was clear enough for you to suggest me
some software package to use and is Beowulf can do this kind of data
replication.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I hope this wasn't too off-topic for this
list.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Respectfully,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Gianni "BugBarbeq"
Rondinini.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>