Benefits of clustered server solutions
A clustered server solution is ideally suited for mission critical projects where downtime, of any length, is unacceptable. Clustered servers provide many advantages to a company including:
- Availablity - Clustered servers provide a highly available platform for deploying applications. Clustered servers ensures that applications continue to run in the event of planned downtime due to maintenance or unplanned downtime due to failures. They also allow operating system and application software to be upgraded across the cluster without having to take down the application.
- Manageability - Clustered servers allow administrators to quickly inspect the status of all cluster resources and move workloads around onto different servers within the cluster. This is useful for manual load balancing, and to perform "rolling updates" on the servers without taking important data and applications offline.
- Scalability - Applications that can be partitioned can be spread across the servers of a cluster allowing additional CPU and memory to be applied to a problem. As the problem size increases, additional servers can be added to the cluster. A partitioned application is one where the data (or function) can be split up into independent units.
Clustered servers provide no single point failure with the added advantage of geographical flexibility. Customers can opt to have their environment clustered across data centres using shared or private IP LAN or VLAN for additional redundancy, if required.
Clustered servers are not don't provide a complete backup system for your applications. It is only one part of a multi-part strategy required to ensure minimum downtime and 100% recoverability.
To find about server back up click on the link.
Clustered servers are usually taken out as part of a managed server solution. For more information on managed hosting click on the link.
