In today's connected world, computing systems have become such an integral part of business that severe consequences occur when systems are unavailable. These systems are used for critical business functions such as order processing, inventory control, transaction processing, customer support, and e-commerce. For years, IT departments have been continually looking for better more innovative ways to provide higher availability to theses systems. The reason is simple. When these critical applications are offline, the result is lost revenue, lost productivity, reduced customer satisfaction, and possible data loss. As a result, these computing systems must be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Historically, enterprise-quality cluster offerings were the domain of proprietary vendors such as Digital, HP or IBM. With the power of today's industry standard servers and the performance of Microsoft's Cluster Servers (MSCS), cost effective High Availability (H/A) clusters can be built on technology and software that your IT department already has.
Together with Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) and industry leading HP Proliant and Integrity servers, H/A Clusters can be built to support both active/active and active/passive cluster configurations. 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. The fact that Microsoft clusters running on commodity hardware are now available and reliable, has made this type of solution affordable. At the same time however, the choices of how to implement MSCS, 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 H/A Microsoft 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, install and configure Microsoft Cluster Servers, and design redundant shared storage architecture to keep that data available.
