Separate search and index servers?

[Scott Simpson <ss...@InterchangeUSA.com>]

I currently have Nutch 0.8 set up with two HDFS machines that store and
process searches and another machine that is both the HDFS "index"
server (where and what each HDFS machine contains) and the machine
running Tomcat to run searches against. Is it possible to separate the
"search" machine from the "index" machine? I want to put the "index"
machine on highly available HA cluster using the Linux Heartbeat system
since it always needs to be around. I then want to create a set of
"search" machines that a load balancer will feed data to and these
machines will in turn send requests to the HDFS machines. Does this make
sense?