An IDC white paper written by Jean S. Bozman examines the rise and needs of high availability in a virtualized world. Spotlighted is the Solaris Cluster and how it addresses many pain points experienced by IT operations looking to improve availability for applications and databases, while utilizing virtualization technologies.

According to a recent IDC study, data centers are deploying high-availability technologies to ensure business continuity for a range of virtualized server platforms. Respondents said that the increasing number of virtual machines (VMs) and the need to keep enterprise workloads available to end users were drivers for high-availability software deployment. Further, the data indicated that the need for high availability would rise over the near term, as VM density grows in the x86 space and as enterprise applications increasingly run on virtualized x86 server platforms.

The increasing number of VMs, when combined with the presence of enterprise applications, means that any downtime will be more disruptive to a business with a heavily virtualized computing infrastructure than one that is more lightly virtualized, Bozman points out. That is why strong support for virtual servers is very important when acquiring software to protect against unplanned downtime.

Solaris Cluster is a high-availability software designed for enterprise workloads. Sun's multi-system, multi-site disaster recovery solution answers many of the pain points identified by availability and clustering software (ACS) customers as reported to IDC. Solaris Cluster can alleviate issues with lengthy or complicated failover processes when applications have to be restarted on alternative computer systems; insufficient onsite IT staff to write, test, and maintain custom scripts to orchestrate the failover of important applications to another server platform in the event of an outage; and an increasing numbers of applications running in virtualized computing environments that need to be protected from the consequences of any failure in their physical host platforms.

Bozman's paper states the Solaris Cluster addresses customers' high-availability needs in three major areas: virtualization, high availability, and flexibility. He expounds on each of these areas, naming specific features in this Sun solution that may be of interest to ACS customers. This is followed by "use case" scenarios for Solaris Cluster to show how real customers have used it to leverage virtualization technologies in support of workload consolidation, resulting in improved levels of availability for the workloads being deployed.

More Information

Addressing Virtualization and High-Availability Needs with Sun Solaris Cluster - IDC white paper (login or registration required.)

Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09

Solaris Cluster Product Page [...read more...]

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