I am trying to build a semi-scaleable (up to three SMP servers), highly-available database without forking over $300k to Oracle. I expect the app to be about 90% reads and 10%writes. The architecture will be the Internet into a Cisco Local Director load balancer that will forward requests to one of three web servers running Apache/PHP. The web servers will have redundant Gb Ethernet cards running into redundant switches, which then run into the three database servers. Each web server will have it's own dedicated database server for reads. For writes, I was planning on having wrapper functions that would modify all three databases for each modifying transaction, thus keeping my data synchronized between database servers. Each database will have it's own storage, as most of the data for the application will be graphics files that I will keep on a NAS, reference by the database instead of storing in the database. Does anyone have experience with such an architecture? Does it sound prudent? Thanks, Mike Millsap
