Mirror Cluster Servers

Clustering Consulting Services

Server mirroring simply involves two duplicate servers attached
to the same network. One server performs the work while the
other receives duplicate (mirrored) data. When one server goes
down, the other is ready to take over in a matter of minutes.
A major benefit is that the servers can be in separate rooms or
buildings for disaster protection. They can even be in different
geographic locations if a powerful enough network connection
is provided. There are also few hardware restrictions on cabling,
controllers or drives.

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Server Clustering

A server cluster, simply put, extends RAID technology into the server arena by creating a system in which one server is redundant to another. This increases the safety and computing power of the entire system. RAID technology has evolved from the need to simultaneously improve performance, expand capacity, and safeguard information from potential catastrophes such as a power outage or hardware failure. With RAID, several independent hard disks are combined to form one large logical array, or one logical hard disk. Along with data, redundancy information is also stored on the array. This may take the form of mirrored data as in RAID level 1, or parity information as in RAID level 5.

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Server Clustering Benefits

Instead of requiring one server to wait on another, server clustering allows each server to act on its own while using one common, redundant mass storage device. In a basic server cluster, two servers would share one RAID array. If one server goes down, the second takes over while still maintaining its own workload. The failover time is greatly reduced because each server is already attached to the information that users are seeking. Also, there is less chance that data will be lost during a system failure. Data does not have to be sent to a backup system at time of failure, because it is already in both servers. Just as important, the cost factor is reduced since it is not necessary to have a separate RAID array in each server, and the backup server is not merely waiting for something to do. It is functioning as an active production server on the network, sharing the processing load.

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