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What the IT Manager Should Know
Windows
2000® Advanced Server®
5. Cluster Service
Features
& Benefits
Line-of-business
applications are central to a company’s operations,
and include systems such as databases, messaging
servers, enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications,
and core file and print services. Cluster service
in the Windows 2000 operating system ensures that
these critical applications are online when needed
by removing the physical server as a single point
of failure. However, this does not add complexity
for users. Because the cluster appears as a single-system
image to end users, applications, and the network,
they can work with the cluster as if it were any
other server.
By
distributing applications over more than one computer
you can achieve a degree of parallelism and failure
recovery as well as provide more availability.
In the event a hardware or software failure occurs
in either node, the applications currently running
on that node (and you may run more than one),
are then migrated by Cluster Service to the surviving
node and restarted. Because Cluster Service uses
a shared-disk configuration with common bus architectures,
such as small computer system interface (SCSI)
and fiber channel, no data is lost during a fail-over.
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