Clustering:what good can it do for my venture?

The great Wikipedia defines clustering as

A computer cluster is a group of linked computers, working together closely so that in many respects they form a single computer. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to each other through fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability.

Clustering is definitely the future of computing everywhere in the world the question is as a entrepreneur what are you doing to adopt it,innovate it and may be even sell it.

Even Google the most used computer application runs on "clusters of more than 15,000 commodity class PCs with fault-tolerant software".

You can read more about it here .

Now , this should be enough to get you buzzing you about clustering.Now that you know what cluster is the next question that should be troubling your brain now is

What all do you need to build a cluster and what type of a cluster do you want to build?

Most of the clusters in the world are compute clusters (clusters with very high processing power) built for solving problems that require such resources unless you want to build and sell these type of clusters on a rental basis(which is a very good idea by the way) you will be much more interested in a "High Availability Cluster" basically quoting Wikipedia again

High-availability clusters (also known as HA Clusters or Failover Clusters) are computer clusters that are implemented primarily for the purpose of providing high availability of services which the cluster provides. They operate by having redundant computers or nodes which are then used to provide service when system components fail. Normally, if a server with a particular application crashes, the application will be unavailable until someone fixes the crashed server. HA clustering remedies this situation by detecting hardware/software faults, and immediately restarting the application on another system without requiring administrative intervention, a process known as Failover.

Yes , this a system that every Web 2.0 Entrepreneur,every new IT company dreams of a rarely failing system (the cluster lives until its last machine lives!!).You can provide customers with innovative cluster solutions that can radically improve their service quality and scalability,whether you want it for yourself or provide it as a service to your customers, cluster

is for you!

The only things you would have t pay for to build clusters are computers,rest all (the operating system,the software is all free).Computers can be of any kind as long as all of them are all the same or comparable configuration even Pentium 2 and Celeron will do, if Google can use them you can too!.For procuring them you can go with the model Purdue and Sun Microsystems adopted basically they have built a 1008 computer cluster consisting entirely of scrapped computers. In India tons of computers are scrapped everyday especially in major IT dense cities like Bangalore and Chennai.But in my opinion the best way to get some cheap scrapped computers is the Indian Govt. the computers are in good condition as they are hardly used and they are cheaper then other alternatives,especially this e-governance initiative has got the babus scrapping a lot more computers nowadays.

This much information about clusters is enough for now. I will write more about the software and the operating system needed for your dream cluster next week!

Neerav Kumar is a very passionate tech-enthusiast and the administrator of Yourstory.in, you can contact him on [email protected]