What is Clustering?

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What is Clustering?

Nowadays, data storage and data availability technologies are becoming increasingly important, as well as the problem of data loss is becoming acute. Clustering technology ensures business continuity and allows automatic disaster recovery without intruding of the side of administrator.

Clustering is the technology of bundling of two or more computer into a network, most often through the existing LAN.

Computer cluster means a group of independent computers operating together as the single system to guarantee that mission-critical applications, services, and resources are as highly-available as possible. Clusters ensure that the parallel processing power of computers that belong to it, is used to the maximum. They provide business continuity in case of failure one or few machines that are participating in cluster and guarantee that the access to the important applications and services will be preserved.

One of the main advantages of High Availability Clusters is possibility to use standard hardware and software, which makes HA solutions affordable for the sector of small and middle business.

IT departments of most enterprises are aimed to find a way to get the maximum productivity avoiding large investments. Enterprise and SMB companies need huge processing power for serving their business-critical application and databases, while their IT budgets are limited and the processing power of a supercomputer is out of reach for most of them. That is why it is becoming a common practice to invest money of companies IT budgets in computer clusters.

The main benefits computer clusters provide are the following:

• Cost reduction: while the processing power and performance of desktop computer has significantly increased in the recent years, their prices are reducing constantly, thus making the clustering technologies more affordable.
• Improved networking: The information can be transmitted with a very little delay.
• Increased processing power.
• Reduction of planed or unscheduled downtime.
• Scalability: it is a fast and easy task to expand computer clusters according to the enterprise’s changed requirements. To do so, it is only necessary to add more nodes to a network.
• Availability and fault-tolerance: clusters ensure availability and fault-tolerance of a system in case of the entire server failure. In this case applications and services automatically failover to another cluster node without somehow impacting end-users.

Download Microsoft Server Clustering 101 Guide:

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