WW_Watcher - 3:34 pm on Jun 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

Ok, I know a bit off topic, but I have to throw this out there.

Does anyone believe that there are 100's of datacenters out there? I personally have always classified a "datacentre" as a physical location, a "room full of boxes".
I have in the past tried to explain basic load balancing & server pool concepts to try to help people understand what they think are watching. I tried to paint a basic simple picture where each of these internet facing IP address is an address of a load balancer, that might redirect to other load balancers, that might redirect to many boxes(server pools) serving up answers to queries.

There is not IMHO 100s of datacenters. There are 100's of internet facing IP address that serve results for queries. Each of these IP addresses within a range, may be mixed and matched in the load balacers, so that one IP address may be in many load balancer pools, and one box, may be in many server pools.

It is possible in a well balanced enviroment to have a single box be in multiple server pools, responding to queries from multiple load balancer pools, all from a single internet facing IP address.

So this begs the question, by doing queries on each of these internet facing IP address, which boxes are responding, where are they, and does it matter? Is valuble to know all of the addresses of the load balancers, when you have no idea if the box returning answer to your query, is responding to only requests from one internet facing ip address(load balancer), or many?

I just had to ask the questions

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WW_Watcher