Hello Blaine,
I like what Eric has written, but I thought I would throw in a few more examples of applications.
> I have a general idea of what clustering technology is, but would
> like someone to explain it's significance to networking in general
> and Novell (as related to WolfMountain) in particular.
The two most important features of clustering are the fault-tolerant aspects, and the ability to share work-load across boxes. Why is that important? The example I like to use is based on a bet I have with some friends. When do you think that the Internet will reach 1 billion users? I've had to define a 'user' as someone who has an e-mail address and an e-mail account. (For those of you interested I have four more years on the bet!)
When governments and other large entities start to subsidize e-mail for the masses, we will reach, and pass, the 1 billion mark. Now if this occurs, where will those accounts be? That would be 10,000 mail servers each holding 100,000 accounts. Or 100,000 mail servers each with 10,000 accounts. In any case it's a lot of mail accounts and a lot of mail servers and a lot of people who will become very dependant on those systems being up and running.
Clustering is a partnering of hardware and software into a system where applications can be developed that run "on the cluster" instead of on any particular machine. Processes can migrate, cached data can migrate, and the number of processors and amount of memory and storage can expand and contract on demand. As the cluster needs more power, additional nodes/chassis can be added to the cluster. As more nodes are added to the cluster, the demands on the cluster interconnect increase and so the cluster interconnect will need to be upgraded.
The Wolf Mountain technologies are examples of a couple of ways to solve many of these types of problems.
The Wolf Mountain technologies are *not* a way to provide simple start-up of an NT process when another NT box blue screens. Novell's SFT-III provided that sort of simple two node failover years ago ...
Scott C. Lemon |
