Apparently, the arrowpoint is integrated into a blade for the Cat 6000 series switches too. As far as I know, you can cluster the arrowpoints, or at lease set up 2 of them for high availability. One thing that sucked about them when we looked at them was the lack of integration with DNS for multiple geographically dispersed datacenters. I think the price was some obnoxious amount also. I know F5's (http://www.f5.com) BigIP and 3DNS setup works excellent. You can run 2 BigIP's and have one set up to take over if the other fails, or you can run them Active/Active and then if one fails over, the other will take over the traffic the failed one was handling. However, if you're putting out over 100Mbit/sec, if you lose one, you're going not going to be able to handle more than 100Mbit. Although, I think they recently added gigabit ethernet support. They can do content verification on your webservers by pulling a specific page every 5 seconds (or whatever you set it to), and it will pull servers out of the VIP that aren't serving good content. By using the integration with the 3dns, you can explicitly set the percentages of traffic which go to each data center. It also has QoS mode where it will direct client to the logically closest/fastest datacenter. F5's products all use a heavily modified version of FreeBSD. We've been using them for a couple of years now, and they are really very good products. There's another product which is nearly the same thing called Eddie, (http://www.eddieware.org I think). It's free, but it only handles http. F5's products handle any protocol that can be mapped to a specific port (http, ftp, smtp, rtsp, wma, etc.) Plus, they are easy to set up, and have a fairly decent web interface. Of course, you can do all maintenance through the command line also. If you go with a 3dns, don't install the Namesurfer software package. It's a graphical DNS manager, and it sucks bigtime. Best Buy just recently went with F5 for their setup also. Jay > -----Original Message----- > From: Perry Hoekstra [mailto:dutchman at uswest.net] > Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 1:26 PM > To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org > Subject: [TCLUG] Content Switches > > > Greet the sun all, > > My question is for all the system admins out there. I am trying to > complete a High Availability analysis for a customer and I am > trying to > address content switches. I looked at all the marketing > drivial for the > ArrowPoint/Cisco 1100 class switch but it's focus is > performance. To my > client, performance takes a second seat to High Availablity. Can a > content switch like an Arrowpoint be clustered, what happens > if one goes > belly up and how do they work with a cluster of Apache servers? > > Thank you for any insight you can give. > > -- > Perry Hoekstra > E-Commerce Architect > Talent Software Services > perry.hoekstra at talentemail.com > _______________________________________________ > tclug-list mailing list > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >