Instant Alerts Get email Alerts on stories that match your interest. To choose a keyword, click here. Choose the right expert at the right price, anytime day or night, at PC World Expert Help . Redundancy A primer on some approaches and issues with server clustering.
Business today is all about system reliability and uptime.
To combat these problems of reliability and redundancy, many companies are turning to server clustering to provide extremely long uptimes. By having multiple network servers working together and using redundant components such as more than one power supply and RAID hard drive subsystems, your overall system uptime can approach 100 percent. There are two basic approaches to clustering servers. One is to use redundant hardware components to make multiple machines appear to be one. This usually requires software changes as well, but the majority of the time and cost is spent developing specialized hardware.