[LINK] Green web servers with netbook components

[Tom Worthington]

At 09:57 PM 19/05/2009, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>... My experience of servers in data centres is that reliability and 
>availability are very important ...

Reliability and availability can be provided by redundant servers, 
rather than servers with redundant components. That is you provide 
more than one server, so that if any of the components fail (power 
supply, disk, network connection or CPU) the other server takes over. 
This is the approach Google takes 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2009/04/google-battery-backed-shipping.html>.

With this approach the design of the individual servers is much 
simpler, at the cost of increased complexity in the software. This 
also provides for the components to be geographically separated for 
another level of redundancy.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University