[olug] Border management / server farms

[Jay Hannah]

Howdy --

Here's a pie in the sky question for you...

Anyone have any experience high availability web/database farms?

I want to have X web servers and Y databases. I need some magical 
device that can know when server(s) in the farm(s) are offline, happily 
continuing to route requests to the other server(s) that are online.

Preferrably I'd use some slice of Linux magic. Alternately, I could 
spend $10K or whatever on some device from Cisco. This is all 
hypothetical at this point, looking at options.

I'm just looking for ballpark info (product names) from anyone w/ any 
experience.

(Yes, I know I could load multiple DNS entries, but I don't want to 
have to wait for DNS timeout(s) if server(s) are offline.)

Thanks,

j