Network Load Balancing and Scaling

Another scaling solution is provided by Network Load Balancing. With Network Load Balancing, two or more computers are combined to provide availability and scalability benefits to mission-critical applications.

A concept called shared nothing supports scalability in clusters. Clusters that use shared nothing have their own system bus and access to disks and networks. This reduces the sharing issues of SMP systems because additional resources are available without extra arbitration. In general, shared nothing is similar to partitioning in an SMP environment except that the resource access latency is lessened. However, if cluster members need to communicate, the latency of communication is much larger than in an SMP system. In addition, if sharing is necessary (that is, the cluster is not a shared-nothing environment), the cost of sharing in a cluster is much higher than the cost of sharing in an SMP system.

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