About cluster systems

Today's e-business infrastructure requires information technology solutions that can meet ever-increasing demands with high reliability and ease of management. In addition, clients want solutions that offer the scalability to grow with the business, the flexibility to rapidly develop and deploy new services, and that deliver these benefits at a reasonable cost. For many clients, clustering is the answer.

Clustering has been the driving force behind many of the world's most powerful scientific supercomputers for many years and is now being used increasingly as a cost-effective way to provide high-performance, high availability computing for a wide variety of commercial workloads such as business intelligence, engineering design, financial analysis, digital media and petroleum exploration.

Clustering is the practice of connecting multiple processors or servers to cooperate on complex workloads as a single, unified computing resource. Because it behaves like a single large resource, a clustered system offers many valuable benefits to a modern e-business environment including:

• High processing capacity—by combining the power of multiple servers, clustered systems can tackle large and complex workloads. One customer was able to reduce the time for key engineering jobs from days to hours, thereby shortening the time-to-market for its new product.
• Resource consolidation—A single cluster can accommodate multiple workloads and can vary the processing power assigned to each workload as required; this makes clusters ideal for resource consolidation and optimizes resource utilization.
• Optimal use of resources—Individual systems typically handle a single workload and must be sized to accommodate expected peak demands for that workload; this means they typically run well below capacity but can still "run out" if demand exceeds capacity—even if other systems are idle. Because clustered systems share enormous processing power across multiple workloads, they can handle a demand peak—even an unexpected one—by temporarily increasing the share of processing for that workload, thereby taking advantage of unused capacity.
• Geographic server consolidation—In addition to the server consolidation described above, some customers even share processing power around the world, for example by diverting daytime US transaction processing to systems in Japan that are relatively idle overnight.
• 24 x 7 availability with failover protection—Because processing is spread across multiple machines, clustered systems are highly fault-tolerant: if one system fails, the others keep working.
• Disaster recovery—Clusters can span multiple geographic sites so even if an entire site falls victim to a power failure or other disaster, the remote machines keep working.
• Horizontal and vertical scalability without downtime—as the business demands grow, additional processing power can be added to the cluster without interrupting operations.
• Centralized system management—IBM offers tools that enable deployment, maintenance and monitoring of large, distributed clusters from a single point of control.

IBM Cluster offerings

	Clustering tutorial