Next: Web Farms
Up: What is High Availability and
Previous: High Availability:
  Contents
In the context of this paper, scalability refers
to the ability to grow services in a manner that is transparent to end
users. Typically this involves growing services beyond a single chassis.
There are a variety of methods for doing this and while it is very
difficult to construct a generic, protocol-independent method for achieving
this either DNS based or layer 4 switching based technologies often form
the core of a solution.
The biggest problem with scaling across multiple machines is data
replication. It is important that the data source is as reliable as
possible. However, asynchronously replicating data between multiple machines
is difficult at best.
Horms
2001-11-23