Software > Load Balancing & HAEssentials

Simon Horman works as a software engineer for VA Linux Systems Japan. In his downtime he also busies himself working on open source projects such as kexec-tools, kexec for Xen IA64, the Linux Virtual Server Project, and the Linux High-Availability Project, which seeks to provide high availability clustering solutions for Linux. At this year's linux.conf.au in Melbourne, Horman will leave his Tokyo base to participate in the conference and to help organise the informal Linux HA Birds of a Feather session. He speaks to Howard Dahdah ahead of his arrival.

Known for anti-spam appliances and firewalls, Barracuda Networks is relatively new to the load-balancing game. The company's series of load balancers span the range from a basic 10-server model that starts at US$1,995 to an enterprise model with an entry price of US$8,999 and that supports an unlimited number of servers and virtual clusters. As the models increase in size and cost, they also add some nice features. These include active/passive high availability that is extremely easy to set up, the ability to route traffic based on the type of service (layer 7 load balancing), cookie persistence for e-commerce (and other applications that need to identify users from one session to the next), and hardware-based SSL acceleration.

A fully virtualised fail-over disaster recovery environment that has been purpose-built for federal government customers is set to go live later this month.

Oracle is breaking out the Linux clustering component of its Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) package and offering it to customers of its Unbreakable Linux support program for Linux users.