Redundancy recomendations?

I am working on a RoR project that fetches some of its data out of an
existing database. The database server is physically located in
Florida. When Wilma went through there were problems, I’m not sure how
much of it was server related or the network connections between
Illinois and Florida. Long story short we are now looking at deploying
a geographically seperate servers for both for the database and
webserver.

Background info, there are currently 2 main webapps and 3 databases
running on one server. One of the databases is logging test data, the
test data is sent to the server in the form of automated emails from
the test devices and a set of Perl script processes the data and
updates the database. If the webapps go down its serious, if the email
collector goes down its critical.

For the webservers I was thinking of setting up 2 servers, each server
would have both webapps in seperate subdomains. I was going to use DNS
for my redundancy. Subdomain A would have server A defined as primary
and server B as secondary, Subdomain B would have the reverse. The
idea being that if everything is normal all traffic goes to the
primary server, if anything goes wrong all traffic is routed to the
backup server. Does this sound like it would work? Has someone tried
this and had it blow up in their face?

Now the fun part, both webapps utilize databases. How can I keep
databases in synch? This isn’t a classic master-slave relationship,
this is closer to a p2p relationship. Would MySQL Cluster solve this
problem?
Has anyone used MySQL Cluster before? Does MySQL Cluster do everthing
it is claimed to do on the MySQL website? Does RoR have a MySQL
Cluster adapter?

Has anyone else faced a similiar issue?

  • Michael

I am working on a RoR project that fetches some of its data out of an
existing database. The database server is physically located in
Florida. When Wilma went through there were problems, I’m not sure how
much of it was server related or the network connections between
Illinois and Florida. Long story short we are now looking at deploying
a geographically seperate servers for both for the database and
webserver.

Background info, there are currently 2 main webapps and 3 databases
running on one server. One of the databases is logging test data, the
test data is sent to the server in the form of automated emails from
the test devices and a set of Perl script processes the data and
updates the database. If the webapps go down its serious, if the email
collector goes down its critical.

For the webservers I was thinking of setting up 2 servers, each server
would have both webapps in seperate subdomains. I was going to use DNS
for my redundancy. Subdomain A would have server A defined as primary
and server B as secondary, Subdomain B would have the reverse. The
idea being that if everything is normal all traffic goes to the
primary server, if anything goes wrong all traffic is routed to the
backup server. Does this sound like it would work? Has someone tried
this and had it blow up in their face?

Now the fun part, both webapps utilize databases. How can I keep
databases in synch? This isn’t a classic master-slave relationship,
this is closer to a p2p relationship. Would MySQL Cluster solve this
problem?
Has anyone used MySQL Cluster before? Does MySQL Cluster do everthing
it is claimed to do on the MySQL website? Does RoR have a MySQL
Cluster adapter?

Has anyone else faced a similiar issue?

  • Michael

On Jan 25, 2006, at 4:18 PM, Michael King wrote:

  • Michael
    Sounds like a cluster is what you want. I don’t know about MySQL
    Cluster, but I have heard very good things about the clustering
    capabilities of OpenBase (www.openbase.com). Ticket #3538 will add
    an adapter for OpenBase.

And no, I don’t work for OpenBase…but they are nice folks with a
quality product.

-Derrick S.