technetra: The Internet helps businesses grow by cutting costs and increasing efficiency. The "always on" nature of the Internet is pushing organizations, such as banks and online stores, to deliver high-availability services to an ever-increasing number of users. In such a context, downtime means an immediate loss of revenue.

The adoption of Linux as the platform of choice for high-availability clusters is driven by a number of factors. First, many organizations find that Linux clusters match or exceed the performance of proprietary solutions while dramatically reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). Lower TCOs are the consequence of combining inexpensive commodity hardware with open source software. Second, the open source character of Linux gives organizations the flexibility to tailor a solution to fit their specific needs. Finally, by using open source software, organizations avoid licensing fees that can otherwise become prohibitive as the number of nodes increases in a cluster, and also avoid vendor lock-in.

Full article...