Core to the NDS8 offering are:
Clustering
In an era of phenomenal data growth, your network needs storage - lots of it - as well as a way to deliver uninterrupted access to information and resources. Novell® Cluster Services™ for Open Enterprise Server meets this challenge: it is a scalable, highly available Storage Area Network (SAN)-resource management tool that reduces administrative costs and complexity.
| One of the primary benefits of Novell Cluster Services is that it provides fail-over capabilities to your server clusters. If one server in the cluster should happen to fail, another server automatically recovers the downed-server's resources and runs in its place. Providing a remote, single point of SAN administration, Novell Cluster Services includes management through Novell iManager. This outstanding administration tool enables you to remotely manage your SAN and cluster resources from any Java-enabled Web browser. A more Interesting NCS based cluster NCS provides server availability by allowing you to configure up to 32 OES servers into a high-availability cluster. An advantage of NCS is that it allows you to protect against both hardware and software failures. When a failure occurs, NCS restarts applications from failed nodes on other designated servers in the cluster. This application restart, or fail-over as it is commonly called, happens so quickly that users generally do not notice that a server failure has occurred. | A Very simple 2 Node Cluster (as with a Windows® Cluster) The application data is generally stored on a shared disk system, commonly called a Storage Area Network (SAN). The SAN is connected via fibre channel cables, cards and switch to all the servers in the cluster. Equally the use of a modern iSCSI based storage solution can provide the same functionality That way, any server in the cluster has access to application data and can be pre-configured to access that data should a software or hardware failure occur. Applications can be individually managed and configured to automatically restart or fail-back to the node they were previously running on once that node is returned to service. If you desire, you can also manually migrate applications to different nodes in the cluster without waiting for a failure to occur. NCS works with all versions of OES (NetWare or SLES 9/10), and relies on eDirectory to provide a single point of administration. Cluster-specific NDS objects are created and managed with iManager. |
