In today's environment you come to expect, even demand, that access to your data be as reliable as the light switch in your office. Yet you've inevitably experienced system outages... no access to e-mail, no access to customer information, can't get access to that critical file or document, or maybe you couldn't access an important customer's or vendor's web site. It's not only frustrating, it totally unproductive. Simply stated, 'time is money', and keeping your business' data on-line and accessible is the foundation of a productive IT environment.

The most cost-effective way to increase your organizations overall access to data is to implement a High Availability (H/A) Cluster.

High Availability refers to the availability of resources in a system or network, in the event of component failures in that system or network. Fail-over clusters involve pooling together multiple servers. Each of these systems monitors the health of other systems in the cluster. In the event of failure in one of the cluster members, the others take over the services of the failed node. The takeover is typically performed in such a way as to make it transparent to the client systems that are accessing the data.

A typical H/A cluster implementation consists of multiple systems attached to a set of shared storage units, such as disks, connected to a shared SCSI or Fiber-Channel bus. Each of the cluster members usually monitors the health of others via network (e.g., Ethernet) and/or point-to-point serial connections. Historically, enterprise-quality cluster offerings were the domain of proprietary vendors such as Digital, HP or IBM. Recently, viable Linux-based cluster offerings that run on commodity hardware have become available.

The fact that open source Linux clusters running on commodity hardware are now available and reliable, has made this type of solution affordable. At the same time however, the various Linux variants, the hardware platform choices, and new technologies such as blade servers have created a new set of issues related to how to best deploy these robust yet inexpensive solutions.

If you have an application that requires constant access, then a Linux cluster could be the answer. Amdex can help you sort this out. We're 'Making IT Easy' to deploy these solutions using the latest industry standard hardware. We'll help you size the application to determine how many servers you need, pick out the right Linux variant for your organization, and design redundant shared storage architecture to keep that data available.