Will Backhand/Wackamole solve my problem?

Hello everyone,

I am currently looking for a solution to a project I am working on, in a 
local financial institution where high performance is needed due to a 
reasonably high number of users accessing the web services everyday.

I'll write a paragraph of the current situation:

The nature of the banking services website consists of a front Internet 
facing Apache 1.3.28 (EAPI, mod_ssl, mod_proxy) being a reverse proxy 
proxying to 3 different machines based on different URLs. Behind the 
reverse proxy, there lies 2 IIS servers, and 1 Apache (mod_jrun) which 
ties to JRun housing Java servlets. The database server is of another 
machine of a deeper DMZ.

I suppose the following diagram shall illustrate better ...


                   +--------+
                   |   RP   | (SSL, HTTP)
                   +--------+
                        |
                       /|\
                      / | \
                     /  |  \
                    /   |   \
                  IIS HTTPD IIS


I realize that the bottleneck is on the RP when in the near future the 
number of users are expected to grow tremendously. When users access the 
banking services, they are forced to enter HTTPS mode, which also 
consumes more processing power than just pure HTTP. Besides, this setup 
is clearly a single-point-of-failure if the RP goes down after a system 
patch, or whatever reason it needs to reboot.

My direction is really to see if backhand/wackamole could be used to 
load-balance/fail-over the RP if one or two more boxes are parked next 
to it, and similarly setup/configured. The goal is performance being the 
first priority, and availability the second ;-) Or both preferably!

Hoping to get various feedbacks. Thank you in advance.


-- 
Kok Wei, Koh <[email protected]>