The Growing Need for Clustering

These days, high availability is in demand. No company would afford to lose a customer when the services they offer to be unreachable, especially since that downtime will almost undoubtedly cost them money. High Availability services offered in most load sharing and balancing software and clustering on NT or Linux clusters offers the solution to this need for a lack of downtime.

Clustering as a technology has been used for many years
but has only recently started to become popular on Intel-based servers. The clustering UltraStor RAID subsystems have two host channels, which make them perfect for NT or UNIX clustering systems. Simply hook it up to two UNIX OR NT Enterprise servers using a standard SCSI card. The system just thinks it is a very large hard disk. RAID functions are controlled by the front panel on the system or can be controlled by a serial port from a computer.

What is Clustering & High Availability?

A cluster is two or more interconnected servers (sometimes called nodes) that create a solution to provide higher availability, higher scalability or both. The advantage of clustering servers for high availability is seen if one node fails, another node in the cluster can assume the workload of the failed node, and users see no interruption of access. The advantages of clustering servers for scalability include increased application performance and a greater number of users that can be supported. You can think of a cluster of servers as if they were a single, unified computing resource. With the total redundancy of multiple servers, the cluster can help achieve greater system uptime.

Clustering can be implemented at different levels of the system, including hardware, operating systems, middleware, systems management and applications. The more layers that incorporate clustering technology, the more reliable, scalable and manageable the cluster.

The UltraStor™ Advantage

UltraStor™ has the advantages over other hardware used in clustering: it runs on dual SCSI ports and provides redundancy and fault tolerance as required in any RAID application. Top-rated redundant hot-swat 300watt power supply and triple hi-speed hot-swap blowers from Delta Electronics, the leader in the power & electronics industry, demonstrates our emphasis on providing superior quality on hardware components in order to meet the 100% uptime required by most mission critical applications. The Power PC based processor deployed in UltraStor™ RAID engine proved not only reliable, but also excellent in speed performance, which was recently certified by NLE application leader Leitch in meeting their power hungry 4-stream video application.