[LWN Logo]

Date: Tue, 08 Dec 1998 16:16:34 +0100
From: Jane Walerud <jane@eddieware.org>
To: editor@lwn.net
Subject: Open Source release of clustering servers

A new version of Eddie is available. It has new and enhanced support for
server clustering with no single point of failure and no shared disk. 

Some of Eddies' new functionality:

- Define which group of machines should run an application. If one
fails, others take over.  Different servers can execute on overlapping
clusters. 

- One application can run on several hosts in parallel, as Eddie's Front
End does. It is possible to start, stop and fail over any instance of
any application.  

- Servers in the same cluster, running on the same node, are seen as a
server group. If a server in the group fails, all servers in the group
are failed over. 

- Eddie now gracefully recovers from network partitioning by 
resynchronizing the replicated database and the clustered servers. 

- Cluster scenarios /configurations can be swapped on the fly.
Reconfiguration is done instantaneously, without taking the site down. 

- LAN load can be scheduled on any http header field. The traffic is
split up in the Eddie front end on the LAN.

For instance, it is possible to direct traffic to different clusters per
site.  In this way, traffic to mission critical sites can be sent to a
large cluster, while traffic to less important sites can be sent to
smaller clusters. 

It is also possible to define clusters for specific content. For
instance, all the graphic content of one site could be on one cluster of
machines, which would be useful for sites with popular graphic content.  

Another possibility is to split traffic in the gateway depending on the
content language. German inquiries would then go to one cluster, and
English inquiries to another. 

- Eddie's load balancing DNS server now directs traffic more optimally
between different Eddie nodes running on the same host. 

- Eddie can be installed on most standard web site configurations
without changes.

- Eddie runs on standard hardware, Linux operating system, and can run
any http back end, like Apache. Eddie is still a beta version. 

For more information, see http://www.eddieware.org

Eddie is an open source initiative from Ericsson, one of the worlds
leading telecommunication providers. http://www.ericsson.se.