Chapter 2. Enterprise Cluster Computing Building Blocks

When building a highly available and scalable enterprise architecture, you must consider the resilience and growth potential of every component in the network and systems path between the client and data. There is little value in investing in a clustered database solution if the network between the users and the database is unreliable or insecure. From a client perspective, the end-to-end reliability and availability of a solution is the product of the values for each subcomponent.

This chapter reviews the business infrastructure components—file, database and name services, and application and web servers—and examines how clustering technology can make them highly available and scalable. The descriptions in this chapter follow the flow of data through an organization, starting with the back-end data repositories and working through to the user-access layer provided by the web servers. The descriptions assume that these components are connected by a reliable, available, and scalable network infrastructure; this infrastructure is not explicitly described since it is beyond the scope of this book. This chapter describes other common computational clustering requirements, and highlights some of the technologies available to write distributed and clustered applications.

This chapter contains the following sections:

• Data Repositories and Infrastructure Services

• Business Logic and Application Service

• User Access Services: Web Farms

• Compute Clusters

• Technologies for Building Distributed Applications