[hylafax-users] Failsafe and load-balanced cluster solution for outgoing faxes

["Uwe Risse" <uwe.risse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, 

We are currently implementing a hylafax cluster solution for failsafe
operation of outgoing faxes.

Does anybody share the following requirements for failsafe and load-balanced
operation?

- As outgoing faxes are business critical we cannot rely on a single hylafax
installation. Though hylafax supports multiple outgoing phone lines in
balanced mode, one hylafax server would be a single point of failure.

- We have to send faxes in a timely manner. Faxes addressed to certain
recipients and faxes that meet some specific business rules are prioritized.
We have to allocate a certain reserve of free phone lines for fax
transmissions that are timely critical. Therefore, the built-in
load-balancing for multiple phone lines in hylafax is not applicable as this
mechanism does share the phone line resources without specific allocation to
critical faxes. Mass transmissions to a single recipient that are doomed to
failure when executing in parallel shall not occupy the phone line resources
for other recipients.

To meet these requirements we have a cluster solution in mind that
implements 

* Multiple hylafax instances running on different hardware.
* A scheduling solution that accepts fax transmission requests from the
preceding application(s): The scheduler accepts requests and allocates them
according to availability and utilization of hylafax queues to the
respective hylafax server. The dispatcher mechanism in the scheduler can be
customized with individual scripting to add consideration of business rules.
This might include consideration of the number of pages to be sent, e.g. to
prioritize shorter fax transmissions.

Benefits of the solution would be:

- A failsafe solution: Should a hylafax server break down, then the load
would be carried over to other servers. This includes fax transmissions that
are waiting in the queue of a failed hylafax server.
- Resource sharing: Load balancing is implemented with respect to priorities
and can be customized for individual business rules.

This all said, is anybody out there who shares these requirements or has
implemented a solution? 


We tend to implement this as an open source stack to an existing scheduling
solution (http://jobscheduler.sourceforge.net). Is anybody interested in
early adoption or wants to contribute?

 

Best regards 
Uwe Risse
 
Software- und Organisations-Service GmbH 
Tel. (030) 86 47 90-34 
Fax. (030) 8 61 33 35 
e-Mail uwe.risse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
Web http://www.sos-berlin.com


 


____________________ HylaFAX(tm) Users Mailing List _______________________
  To subscribe/unsubscribe, click http://lists.hylafax.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi
 On UNIX: mail -s unsubscribe hylafax-users-request@xxxxxxxxxxx < /dev/null
  *To learn about commercial HylaFAX(tm) support, mail sales@xxxxxxxxx*