load balancing question / recommendation

[Ilan Berkner]

Hi All,

Currently we have a single web server (nginx) with multiple php application
servers (php-fpm) and the load is being handled well.  The raid controller
failed last week on the web server and we were down for a few hours.  Adding
a hardware or software based load balancer in front of the web server and
using additional web servers, although still represents a single point of
failure, will further increase the availability of our system should one of
the web servers fail.  We will be fully redundant in the future.

Our provider is recommending:
http://www.redhillnetworks.com/products/webmux/load-balancer.htm as a
hardware solution, which I'm fine with, but I wanted to put it to this
group, is it better to use a hardware solution such as this or to add
another server with Nginx as a reverse proxy to a group of web servers?

>From a hardware point of view, we don't have any choice in terms of a load
balancer (other than putting up another server with software on it).

Looking for real life experiences / recommendations and suggestions.

Thanks!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/attachments/20101214/6499aa17/attachment.html>