Introduction to Storage Networking Server Clustering
Server Clustering Users Heartbeat Servers
Storage Subsystem SAN Switch
Storage Subsystem
• Server access to common storage resources • Failure of a single server still provides data access • Simplified storage resource management
Server clustering is one of the first and most prevalent SAN applications because it requires that multiple servers have access to common storage resources. The early clustering architectures used a heartbeat between the cluster members to determine if a host member was available and functional. Newer cluster architectures use a common disk area to determine host member availability and functionality. This could be a quorum disk or alternatively it could rely on the SCSI reservation settings for this determination.