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.