Here's the issue. Customers like the idea of distributed architecture, but are reluctant to do it. We've (FGC) developed an intelligent DNS product that works like a Cisco Distributed director, and can offer it for free to our customers. It does not cost customers anything additional to be in two sites, but they do not want the management hassles. One of the main issues for large sites is database replication. For example. If you have a search engine in both Herndon VA, and Sunnyvale, CA, the amount of cross country bandwidth to reliably do database replication in real time is huge. Therefore it is easier for that site to stay in one location. If you have a static site with no database, chances are they are not large enough to need a distributed architecture. Jason
Then you get into address aggregation issues that have already been discussed before.
The way I see it, an intelligent content distribution scheme addresses the vast majority of these concerns.
So, a question to the large web farms. Why is it that the largest web sites still seem to be hosted out of a single data center?
Where do you get your data? It seems to me that the bulk of the largest web sites with which I am familiar are located in at least two datacenters.
____________________________________________________ Jason Zigmont (N1JIV) jzigmont@globalcenter.net Senior Account Executive 212.618.9625 (V) Frontier GlobalCenter 212.571.2036 (F) http://www.globalcenter.net 1.888.795.3124(Pager) *Got Clue?!?! http://www.ispf.com *Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail: http://www.cauce.org