Scaling Debian - SSI Linux
Greetings all,
Thanks to Debian and this list, I have grown in the past four years from
Linux hobbyist to smalltime sysadmin with a brokerage firm, to sysadmin
at an ISP. One of the best things about my last job has been that the
bosses placed their confidence in me and Debian. Backed by the quality
of the software and the support of the lists I have been able to meet
the challenges.
Now the company I work for has grown to be a voice and data services
provider poised to compete at a national level. And decisions have to
be made about the server OS and hardware platform that will meet the
challenge. We currently run Debian on a bunch of servers, with services
distributed randomly among machines. We are set up so that we can
restore a service manually on another machine if the machine providing
the service goes down, so availability isn't too bad. But we're now
thinking about scalability.
The bosses are happy to renew their confidence in me and Debian, but
their question is "can Debian scale to meet the expansion, or should we
make the decision to go to heavy metal UNIX?" And I have the same
question. I naturally want to stick to Debian, which has rocked so
far. But I don't think we can continue to run JBOS (Just A Bunch Of
Servers) for much longer. We need to go to an available and scalable
solution.
I've been thinking of Single System Image Linux (SSI Linux) for some
time. This will have the advantage of leveraging the currently
available dozen or so servers, avoiding the purchase of heavy metal. It
will also allow addition of resources as demand requires, rather than
initial overprovisioning as is done with heavy metal. Has anyone on the
list gone to production with Debian and SSI Linux?
Does anyone on the list have any other suggestions re. Debian
scalability and availability?
--
Best regards,
| George Karaolides OTEnet Telecommunications Ltd.,
|
| System Administrator 2nd Floor, 20 Agias Paraskevis St.,
|
| tel: +357 22 45 65 00 Strovolos, Nicosia CY 2002,
|
| email: george.karaolides@planitis.net Republic of Cyprus.
|
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