Introduction to Storage Networking
Server Clustering
Server Clustering
• A group of servers acting as a single system with
shared storage resources
• One of the first applications for SANs
• Server clusters offer significant advantages:
– High availability
– Enhanced performance
– Load balancing
– Reduced latency
– Flexibility
– Scalability
– Administration/Manageability
Server clustering is a “meta-application”:
Clustering can provide increased reliability, scalability, and performance
for nearly any application.
Clustering and SANs go hand-in-hand because clusters require that
multiple servers access the same storage resources.
Clustering was one of the first applications for SANs.
Server clusters offer benefits to SANs:
High availability due to elimination of single point of failure,
failover/fallback capability
Enhance performance by eliminating bottlenecks
Load balance across multiple data paths
Reduce latency by sharing bandwidth between servers and storage
Flexible allocation of host and storage resources
Independent scaling of application, server, or storage resources