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| Clustering Module |
| Enhanced Performance, Scalability, and Reliability |
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Customers are able to further enhance the performance
of Sapphire through clustering. A
cluster is a group of application servers that work
together as a single logical server to manage client
object requests among themselves. Clustering
facilitates load balancing, a process that routes client requests to servers within the cluster. If one or more
servers fail, client requests are automatically routed to
other servers within the cluster so there is no break in
service.
With load balancing, overall performance is scaled up
by multiplying your single server performance by the
total number of nodes in the cluster. Sapphire R4
achieves load balancing by running a cluster of
identically configured servers, and utilizing Microsoft's
Network Load Balancing (NLB) technology. NLB currently supports 8 node clusters.
There are hardware alternatives that support
significantly more cluster nodes.
The results of this benchmark demonstrate a cluster's performance when being saturated by HTTP requests. As shown by this graph, scalable improvements to Sapphire are achieved by adding additional servers to the cluster. This test was conducted as if each user were requesting pages simultaneously, thus representing approximately 250 concurrent users. Study performed and documented by LabVantage Solutions, Inc.

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