Zend adds clustering for PHP Web app server

Zend Technologies on Wednesday will ship its Zend Server Cluster Manager, which enables scaling and high availability for its Zend Server Web application server in large-scale PHP deployments.

Deployable in cloud environments or on-premise, Cluster Manager enables IT teams to centrally monitor and manage multiple Zend Server instances. Application management capabilities enable IT organizations to move additional Web workload to PHP.

[ InfoWorld recently reviewed eight PHP power tools. | Debugging a mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL requires the right tools. See InfoWorld’s “Debugging PHP Web apps is hard to do” for tips. ]

“What Zend Cluster Manger does is, together with Zend Server, makes [the combination] a high-availability cluster solution,” said Eldad Maniv, Zend‘s vice president of products and marketing.

Cluster Manager currently scales to tens of servers, but plans call for extending its scalability beyond that, Maniv said.

Configuration of PHP directives, extensions, and caching rules are synchronized across a cluster to ensure consistency, Zend said. Cluster Manager currently is supported on the Amazon cloud.

PHP, Maniv noted, is popular in e-commerce Websites.

Zend Server Cluster Manager pricing starts at $4,690 for an annual subscription. Zend Server 5 was introduced in February, providing an enterprise PHP stack with application management capabilities such as performance optimization and code tracing.

Zend also is planning to unveil a licensing model for PHP in cloud environments.

“It really changes the licensing model for how to leverage PHP in the cloud,” Maniv said.

This article, “Zends adds clustering for PHP Web app server,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter and on your mobile device at infoworldmobile.com.