As more and more mission-critical applications move on the Internet, providing highly available services becomes increasingly important.  One of the advantages of a clustered system is that it has hardware and software redundancy, because the cluster system consists of a number of independent nodes, and each node runs a copy of operating system and application software.  High availability can be achieved by detecting node or daemon failures and reconfiguring the system appropriately, so that the workload can be taken over by the remaining nodes in the cluster. 

Advent Consulting provide advanced configuration solutions by using following tools to achieve high performance, highly available server environment on Linux:

Cluster Network Services

Ultra Monkey is a project to create load balanced and highly available network services. For example a cluster of web servers that appear as a single web server to end-users. The service may be for end-users across the world connected via the internet, or for enterprise users connected via an intranet. 

Linux Virtual Server

The Linux Virtual Server (LVS) is a highly scalable and highly available server built on a cluster of real servers, with the load balancer running on the Linux operating system. The architecture of the server cluster is fully transparent to end users, and the users interact as if it were a single high-performance virtual server.