Integrating Clustering and Load Balancing for Higher Availability and Scalability in Web Server Environment

Integrating Clustering and Load Balancing for Higher Availability and Scalability in Web Server Environment

This study is based on the analysis of the research article “Integrating Clustering and Load Balancing for Higher Availability and Scalability in Web Server Environment” by Omar Farouk. In the starting Farouk clearly describes the importance of web servers in today's business organizations. According to Farouk, business organizations have come to rely on Web servers as part of their strategic usage of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The World Wide Web (WWW) is still relatively new. It began in 1989, the brainchild of Tim Bernes-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), to address the need for a collaborative tool to help scientists share knowledge. It was then offered to the entire Internet community to experiment with, and thus the WWW was born.

What is the WWW? It is a huge, ever-growing collection of hyperlinked documents created by independent authors, stored on computers known as Web servers, and made accessible to anyone over the Internet via software applications called browsers and various search engines accessible through browsers. Browsers provide a relatively user-friendly interface (at least compared to trying to use the Internet in the days before browsers) for navigating and viewing the total information space represented by all sites on the WWW. Thus, whereas the Internet is an electronic communications network that generally supports various kinds of communications including E-mail, the WWW represents a repository of public information created by the public and accessible to the public via the Internet.

By analogy, the Internet is an electronic pony express, providing an electronic means to move information from one physical location to another; Email is an on-line post office/postal service, providing an on-line process for using the pony express (the Internet) to send and receive private mail; the WWW is an on-line library, storing and providing public access to a huge body of information; and search engines and browsers are partly an on-line Dewey Decimal classification system/card catalog, providing an on-line method for finding and viewing information stored on the WWW over the Internet.

In this article Farouk tried to penetrate the network through attacking the different port numbers to reach the servers behind the DMZ; however, the firewalls denied all access through illegitimate ports. Only the ports necessary for accessing data were open for legitimate requests. Furthermore, author tried to penetrate the systems through the standard port number; however, the firewall successfully thwarted the attack by changing the standard port number to another one. For instance, while trying to penetrate through port 80, the firewall changed it to port 3355. Nevertheless, for legitimate service, the change of port was transparent to the clients.

Farouk further explained that information and knowledge about the physical environment are acquired mainly through visual perception. The physical environment contains surfaces, objects, and events that perceivers use to adapt to and make sense of their environment. The World Wide Web (WWW) is ...