Linux High
Availability Clustering
Linux High Availability Clustering Consulting Services
High Availability (HA for short)
Clustering refers to the availability of resources in a computer
system, in the wake of component failures in the system. This can be
achieved in a variety of ways, spanning the entire spectrum ranging at
the one end from solutions that utilize custom and redundant hardware to
ensure availability, to the other end to solutions that provide software
solutions using off-the-shelf hardware components. The former class of
solutions provide a higher degree of availability, but are significantly
more expensive, than the latter class. This has led to the popularity of
the latter class, with almost all vendors of computer systems offering
various HA products. Typically, these products survive single points of
failure in the system,
For the latest information about
Linux High
Availability Clustering
Impact of Linux High Availability Clustering
With the increasing popularity of
cluster computing in the last decade,
it is being widely used in various types of fields, including mission
critical applications. Such applications are typically not tolerant to
system failures and the resulting loss of service, and require that the
system on which they run provide little downtime, planned or unplanned.
This has naturally led to a strong demand for good
High Availability
Linux solutions for the
cluster environment, and most of the important players in the industry
are providing HA solutions, with varying feature-sets and varying levels
of service (in terms of uptime guarantees). Most commercial HA systems
currently support a cluster of two or four servers, with future plans
for larger clusters.
For the latest information about the
Impact of Linux High Availability Clustering
Why use High Availability Linux Clustering?
High-availability (HA) clusters can dramatically
cut downtime, and since service failovers are fast and automatic, system
administrators get to finish their lunch and users get to finish their
work. "Admins" are happy, users are happy, even pointy-haired managers
are happy, because minimizing work stoppages saves money.
Although high-availability means different things to different
people, here it refers to highly-available clusters. An HA
cluster is a set of servers that work together to provide a set of
services. In an HA cluster, services don't belong to any one
server in the cluster, but to the cluster as a whole. If one server
fails, its services are provided quickly and automatically by another
server.
For the latest information about
Why use High Availability Linux Clustering
