Load balancing incoming IP requests across a farm of clustered MySQL servers

Data reliability and availability becomes a need growing every day. Today, a database system can serve more than one purposes. Depending on the context, Total Cost of Ownership or High Availability or both can be the requested specification for a database system implementation. This paper presents an Open Source, high availability and redundancy Database platform, which is used for storing raw geo-environmental data for further processing. The system is maintained by the Department of Electronics Engineering of the Technological Educational Institution of Athens, to support research activity in the context of INTERREG III B ARCHIMED framework. The main challenges for this platform were to create it based on commodity hardware, make it open but secure, redundant, capable to adapt to load peaks and eventually reduce the Total Cost Of Ownership and Operation in minimum levels in order to reserve funds from the budget for other purposes. In this paper we present the architecture and the topology, the principles of operation and indicative results of performance measurements.