Linux Web Server Clusters Emerge

Linux Web Server Clusters Emerge (excerpt)
David Orenstein, ComputerWorld, August 16 1999

...Brisbane, Calif.-based TurboLinux Inc. is bringing high-availability cluster traits like load balancing and fail-over to basic Web serving, said Dan Birchall, a beta tester of the company's TurboCluster technology at Web hoster Digital Facilities Management Inc. in Haddonfield, N.J. Birchall implemented a cluster that he said has performed well and cost about $7,500 compared with a $75,000 commercial Unix cluster.

Linux To Gain Features For Both Notebooks And Servers

Linux To Gain Features For Both Notebooks And Servers (Excerpt)
Mitch Wagner, InternetWeek, August 11 1999

...Vendors at LinuxWorld introduced add-ons to Linux. Among these was TurboLinux, which introduced its own support for Linux clustering. Any TCP/IP application can be clustered using TurboCluster software by running one copy of the application of each node of a Linux cluster, with TurboCluster handling load-balancing and failover of nodes, according to the company. No theoretical limit exists for the number of nodes that can be managed; the application has been tested with up to 20 nodes.

Web hosting company Digital Facilities Management uses the software on a two-node cluster, and the company is pleased with the costs savings compared with a Unix system, said Dan Birchall, a consultant to Digital Facilities Management.

"It gives us complete redundancy and does it for a tenth of the price of anyone else on the Unix end of things," Birchall said. The company priced SGI and Sun Microsystems clusters and found they would be priced at $30,000 per node; a server running Linux does the same job for less than $3,000 per node for a single-processor Pentium III server running at 450 MHz, with 250 MBs of RAM and 10 GBs storage on each box.