How Much will it Cost

Salim writes.
"I want to set-up a clustering environment so as to build cluster-aware application.I am using windows 2000 advance server.So can you please tell me how much will it cost(min.) to set up this kind of infrastructure which implements clustering on two servers.And please tell me the minimum sysfiguration required for this."

This all depends on what you want to accomplish and how large the application you want to cluster is. If you are clustering the Apache webserver which is very resource efficient, you can get away with a couple of 200 - 300 MHz computers for testing purposes and slightly faster machines for production (depending again on how large the site is and how resource hungry it is).

Windows 2000 Advance server will run resonably well - by itself - on a computer with IDE drives and 256 MB RAM. However, if your going to spend the thousands it costs to buy Win2K Advanced Server, normally you would put it on a system which is worth at least as much as the software.

For a decent production system with cluster certified RAID controllers and external storage from a major vendor, you can count on about $3000.00 - $5000.00 per server and the same or more (depending on storage requirements) for the RAID enclosure.

For testing, you can use the test system I suggest here which you should be able to build from some spare desktops and an external SCSI case. If you bought it new you would pay about $3000.00 US for the bits and pieces.

You could also go whole hog and buy big name hardware from HP/Compaq or IBM or DELL with an EMC RAID Array and pay in excess of $100,000.00.

Again it all depends on what you need to accomplish and how large the application you are trying to cluster is. Sorry not to give a definate figure but it's a pretty grey area and every vendor you talk to about this will give you a wildly different quote.

The more you learn about clustering, the better you will be able to judge.

Leon

Posted by Leon at June 16, 2002 03:10 PM