Is clustering right for my business?

What's Your Question � Ask Our Experts..

Ask any technology visionary about the future of the IT industry and their answer may well include the concept of grid technology deployment.

In this model, the combined processing power of a massive grid of connected computers is made available for subscribing organisations to tap into, as and when they need it, just like any other utility such as electricity or water.

That grand vision of ‘utility computing' is still some way off - but plenty of companies have already bought into the idea of parallel computing, and are bolting servers together in order to create more powerful computing resources, says Rhiannon Sharpe, UNIX specialist at Logicalis.

In fact, many of the technological and financial barriers that previously made clustering a strictly high-end technology, have crumbled in recent years, she says. "This is no longer just about mainframe computing - the technology is now available to enable you to cluster any systems from mainframes, right down to commodity Linux and Wintel boxes," she says.

So how can a technology manager know if clustering's right for their business? According to Sharpe, there are two main reasons that a company might use clustering: first, for high-performance computing, and second, to ensure resilience, using failover clustering.

1.High-performance

When massive demands are placed on computers to number-crunch and analyse data, clustering can be a powerful proposition. "This is why it's been such a hit in academic circles and R&D departments," says Sharpe. But that capability also makes clustering ideal in other industries, she says - for example, in financial services companies that need to perform complex risk analysis.

2.High resilience

Where a computing process is particularly complex and time-intensive, or extremely mission-critical, there's more risk associated with a server failing. Clustering works well in these environments, says Sharpe, because if one node in the cluster fails, the others can, and will, pick up the slack, so there's no loss of service and no loss of data.

What's more, clustering can also be kind to the workload and budget of the hard-pressed IT department, says Sharpe. "If you need to upgrade the servers that reside in a cluster, you can take them out one at a time and upgrade them, without any interruption to the service that they support," she says.