Sun Cluster is free!
02 Dec '05 - 01:49 by benrOf all the newly announced free products from Sun the one that interests me the most is Sun Cluster, including the agents and Geo Edition. This makes Sun Cluster free in more ways than just "no cost", it means that we're all free to deploy HA solutions in situation that never would have been possible before due to cost constraints. I think we've all deployed systems and services in that past where a solid clustered solution would have been preferable but in an effort to keep costs as slim as possible you just couldn't squeeze it on there. No longer are our hands bound!
If you haven't tried Sun Cluster 3.x your seriously missing out! Sun Cluster 2.2 left a lot to be desired. It was a "good" product, but it came with a lot of fear and nasty upgrades/patches involving full cluster outage were expected. That went out the window with Sun Cluster 3.0 and improvement comes with every release, culminating in Sun Cluster 3.1 8/05 in which Solaris 10 support and support for N1 Grid Containers (Zone failover) was added.
And if you think that Sun is only releasing the JES related agents your dead wrong! Check out the agents list, all of which are downloadable right now:
- HA Apache
- HA DHCP
- HA DNS
- HA MySQL
- HA N1 Grid Service Provisioning System (SPS)
- HA NFS
- HA Oracle
- HA Solaris 10 Zones
- HA Sun Grid Engine
- HA Samba
- Oracle RAC (SVM & HW RAID)
Clearly this opens a huge number of new possibilities. And if you've been stuck in the HA dulldrums known as Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) then your salvation has arrived. VCS doesn't hold a candle to Sun Cluster 3.1, no way, no day.
I would recommend though, that if you put SC into production that you have Sun Profesional Service (Sun PS) come out and help you with your implementation. The service isn't terribly outragious and they'll certify your cluster and give you an extra measure of confidence in your cluster. I was unhappy about paying the extra money for the service when I did my Sun Cluster 3.0 rollout but it was well worth it. Not only was the cluster certified and I had some experts to bounce ideas off of but they run through a comprehensive checklist when they are done (basically they break your cluster in every way it could possibly be broken while you watch) which leaves you with a very satisfied feeling of comfort and peace of mind that your really rolling out something that is going to do exactly what you need it to.
To toss in an extra customer success story... I deployeed my companies primary Oracle 9i database server on a pair of Sun V1280's with 2 Sun StorEdge 3510 arrays with Solaris 9 and Sun Cluster 3.0. We deployeed the system 889 days ago. In that 2.5 years we have had 100% uptime! No crappy 5 9's, I'm talking 100 frickin' percent. The cluster has never even failed over. On a handful of occasions when Oracle shutdown mistakenly Sun Cluster had the database back online before the clients even realized it.
Sun Cluster is hands down the best HA cluster solution available. Sure, there are other solid systems out there but they don't have anywhere near the sophistication or flexability that Sun Cluster provides. So download SC 3.1 for yourself and make sure to buy a copy of Sun Cluster 3 Programming: Integrating Applications into the SunPlex Environment to learn how you can build the custom HA solution of your dreams and have a ton of fun while doing it.
This site is a lot of fun very well designed.
mercy (Email) (URL) - 13 June '06 - 00:04
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