[ale] Extended or Global Clustering

[Kevin O'Neill Stoll]

Hey everyone,

I'm searching for whitepapers, books and/or people resources to learn more about extended or global clusters. I'm more interested in the "meat and potatoes" of the handful of ways people have accomplished this. I know Weather Channel Interactive and Dell.com offer this type of clustering model, but they are under NDA agreements - so no dice.

In my search I have found many books and resources that like to talk about datacenter (layer 1 and 2) type issues for managing a cluster (automation of bulids, config and patch management), discussions about commodity hardware versus "big iron" or the like and various product choices. I suppose what I'm hoping for is practical "hands-on" knowledge of how such a setup was done from each layer of the puzzle ( network, storage, systems, load balancing, database, application servers )

Seems the 1st thing that comes to mind when you mention this is, start with dark fibre and work up from there but I'm sure there are other variations to accomplishing this goal. As opposed to actual configurations, I guess I'm focusing on the high level architecture choices - realizing you shouldn't forget to deal with individual applications which respect to how intelligent they are or which frameworks they use (think EJB or ESB models) but that's a whole other can of worms.

Thanks for the help and listening to me ramble.

Kevin Stoll
"Some people are like slinkies - they don't serve much purpose, but they make you smile when you tumble them down the stairs"




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