Server clusters offer speed, savings

When retail services firm Datavantage acquired the code last year to roll out its gift-card offering that would provide retailers a transaction platform to store and manage retail credits, it knew its back-end system couldn't stand any downtime. It also knew it didn't want to shell out loads of money to keep the system running on the expensive Unix infrastructure on which it was built.

So the Cleveland firm scrapped the legacy platform, a Sun E450 running Oracle. Instead, Ian Amit, development manager at Datavantage, deployed a cluster of Intel-based HP ProLiant servers running Linux and Oracle's 9i Real Application Cluster database.

Increasingly, companies are looking at ways to cluster smaller, low-end servers to achieve performance and reliability that is equal to or better than expensive, high-end boxes. Clustering servers is nothing new. For years, mainframes have been strung together in what are called Parallel Sysplex Clusters to let workloads be shared across all available resources. Unix systems also provide clustering capabilities with vendors providing proprietary software, such as Sun's Sun Cluster and IBM's high-availability cluster multiprocessing technology.

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When retail services firm Datavantage acquired the code last year to roll out its gift-card offering that would provide retailers a transaction platform to store and manage retail credits, it knew its back-end system couldn't stand any downtime. It also knew it didn't want to shell out loads of money to keep the system running on the expensive Unix infrastructure on which it was built.

So the Cleveland firm scrapped the legacy platform, a Sun E450 running Oracle. Instead, Ian Amit, development manager at Datavantage, deployed a cluster of Intel-based HP ProLiant servers running Linux and Oracle's 9i Real Application Cluster database.

Increasingly, companies are looking at ways to cluster smaller, low-end servers to achieve performance and reliability that is equal to or better than expensive, high-end boxes. Clustering servers is nothing new. For years, mainframes have been strung together in what are called Parallel Sysplex Clusters to let workloads be shared across all available resources. Unix systems also provide clustering capabilities with vendors providing proprietary software, such as Sun's Sun Cluster and IBM's high-availability cluster multiprocessing technology.

But the improved performance and reliability of low-end servers has IT managers looking at clustering in a new light, analysts say. Systems vendors and software makers are pushing the trend. For example, last year Dell and Oracle unveiled efforts to push clusters of low-cost, standards-based systems to provide business customers with processing power previously only available on expensive, high-end machines. Finding applications that can run in such distributed environments is one hurdle, but software vendors are beginning to introduce offerings. Oracle's 9i RAC, for example, was designed specifically to run on clustered servers. Analysts say business customers can expect more applications to follow.

Part of the reason for the shift is that IT managers, forced to do more with less in recent years, have begun buying more low-end servers, which at the same time have become more powerful, analysts say. While server revenue has dragged in the midrange and high end during the past few years, server sales on the low-end (servers priced less than $25,000) continued to grow throughout the downturn, according to IDC.

"IT managers got so accustomed to buying the volume servers during the downturn, I think that has kind of predisposed them to say, 'Gee, let me see how I can use this type of computing going forward,'" says Jean Bozman, vice president of global enterprise server solutions at IDC.

For Amit, the cluster of low-end Linux servers has resulted in a substantial cost savings and improved performance. Whereas the Sun infrastructure cost about $1 million, Amit set up a new infrastructure that includes the cluster of two two-processor ProLiant DL580 servers running Oracle for about $250,000.

"We didn't like the old platform. It had down time that exceeded the [service-level agreement] that we were supposed to provide customers. We had problems managing the Oracle instance, and the data itself was becoming a nightmare because you literally cannot take the system down. For every little hiccup that the system had, that was downtime," he says.