Delivers continuous availability of core data services and simplifies system administration, lowering the cost of cluster deployment. Failovers are seamless to the application, and result in improved availability of network services. Allows a single application, or series of applications from a service, to run across multiple domains or systems. By adding more domains or systems to the cluster, capacity and continuity are increased. Multiple services can share the cluster, and multiple service instances ensure that the service is maintained in the event of failures.
System administrators can load balance across multiple servers.
There is no break in service during a node failure. The cluster service is running and only service-level recovery is required. Provides fast error detection, fast software switch-over, and parallelized application and infrastructure restarts. If a failover does occur, clients might see a brief interruption in service, and in some cases, may need to reconnect after a failover has finished. However, once reconnected, the physical server from which they get applications and data is transparent.