Clustering Web Accelerators

Web Accelerators are increasingly becoming an integral part of a Web site content delivery infrastructure. As such, Web accelerators must address some common server issues such as: capacity, performance, and availability. A set of Oracle 9iAS Web Caches can be grouped into a loosely coupled cluster to help solve these issues. When clustered, Web Cache's capacity increases linearly. In addition, the number of cacheable miss requests sent to the application Web server is reduced linearly. Also, the impact on site availability and performance of an individual Web Cache node failure in a cluster is reduced considerably. In this paper, we describe the Web Cache clustering architecture, focusing on how this feature affects site capacity, performance, and availability.