Shared Disk and Shared Nothing: Architectures for Clustering

(Craig Mullins) Conducting business in the 21st century requires modern systems that expand operations to more customers across the globe. Regardless of the time or date, customers expect an e-business to be up and running, available to serve their current needs. Full functionality and non-stop availability is expected. An e-business must be prepared to engage with customers at any time or risk losing business to a company whose web site is more accessible. System outages, whether planned (for maintenance and tuning) or unplanned (due to hardware failure, bugs, or viruses), are the enemy of the successful e-business. Many organizations turn to clustering as they look to increase the fault tolerance and computing capabilities of their hardware.