Applications can be made scalable through replication, thereby increasing performance, throughput, and failure resiliency. To cope with exponential business growth, IT departments have scaled their infrastructures by adding more servers to increase performance and availability. A major concern of IT departments is whether changes to the infrastructure or application can be made quickly or incrementally to the environment, without negatively affecting the entire infrastructure. Another concern is whether system maintenance can be performed without affecting service levels. The process of getting to where IT is today has been to keep the application up and running.
Functionality is the initial market differentiator.
Availability and scalability are after- thoughts, and have come into focus because of rapid growth in the Internet market. Because these critical infrastructure decisions were not considered during the development and design process, changing these applications and infrastructures presents costly and risky challenges. For the people and process factors, Sun Cluster 3 provides a single management view that enables an administrator to perform many maintenance tasks on the cluster as if it were a single system. For example, a disk can be added to one node and automatically be made available to all other nodes. This eases administration and lowers the chance of human error.