ipfailover, redundancy for filmakerserver, mail and web: how

[Anonymous]

hi,

i need for our business a mail/web/filemakerserver running in a datacenter about 600 km away of my office.
this server will be the heart of our company, so it must have a real good uptime.
is it possible to configure apples xserve that it “knows” that there runs a spare-server which is completely the same? and is it possible, in a troublecase, that the spareserver takes over the complete traffic?
or is a loadbalancer needed?

or should i buy other hardware than xserve?

thanks for your help

best regards

chris

[Anonymous]

Hi Chris,

A couple thoughts.

While chatting with a high end Unix guru – former Sun employee – about options to ensure 24/7 uptime for FileMaker Server, he mentioned that with OS X it was possible to set up a second server as an IP failover box. The failover box would sit idle until the first was not responding, then it would assume the IP of the first. You would need a Unix guru to configure it as far as I know….. but the point is that even if you went Unix/Linux, the configuration would be very similar on a Mac OS X box.

And you would still have to work out how to keep both FM Server boxes synced so the data was correct on the failover box if (when) the time comes. Maybe an NAS like an Xserve RAID connected to both the primary and failover boxes, so the same data is available no matter what???

At MacWorld back in Jan., I spoke breifly with a guy from http://www.lakeviewtech.com/technology/index.asp . Check the bottom two products: clusters and echostream.

Looks like what you need. Not sure how it works, frankly, but at the time they had demos on CDs, so you could check it out. Claimed to allow server replication anywhere on a WAN, which is nice. You could have the failover box right next to you.

Have not had time to pursue this, so if you do, please post back, good or bad. Wanna say the cost was like $3000, which seemed reasonable for what it is *supposed* to do.

Good luck.

[Anonymous]

Hi again Chris,

Just a follow up. The biggest problem (in my mind at least) is that you have to somehow have the live and up to date data available to both the primary and secondary server.

Apple is on it’s way to releasing a solution for this. Check out: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/apr/18xsan.html

[Author]

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