I have been trying to track down a clustering solution for two RaQ3i's. I was originally looking at StaQware but Sun does not support the product anymore. I also remembered a product called Polyserve on the Cobalt's solutions web page but after some investigation that works out to be too expensive compared to StaQware. My questions are what other solutions are available for clustering? What are hosting providers doing with regards to maintaining 99.9% uptime? It is all fine and well backing up but if the hard drive crashes or something goes wrong? It's going to be a mission configuring and getting another RaQ running ASAP.
We looked at Polyserve as well but the cost was very high!We use RaQ4r's (with dual hard drives - which after all is the most likely cause of failure) plus keep some hot-spare RAQ4's, spare hard drives and memory modules sitting ready.
If a RaQ4r drive fails it has a second one built in so no downtime until you need to replace the hard drive. If the failure is more major (perhaps the motherboard or power supply) we can just remove the drives from the failed RaQ and install in one of the hot-spares!
That way you can typically keep downtime due to a hardware failure to less than 15-20 minutes! On top of that we ensure we run backup DNS and mail exchanges on other machines so you only really lose web access.
If you have quite a few RAQ's it may be cheaper to keep another hot-spare RAQ and some spares! Perhaps speak to your host - if they host other RaQ's perhaps they would consider keeping some spares for their customers (cheaper still!).
Thanks...