HA applications

[Jos Visser]

Hi Alan,

As you might remember, I work for a company that specialises in building
Unix clusters (Sun, Veritas, HP-UX) for a living. Apart from the actual
technical implementation, we teach in cluster sysadmin courses and
perform cluster audits.

The customers we encounter use cluster technology to make their central
information services highly available. These include:

- Databases (Oracle, Informix, Sybase)
- SAP
- Hospital information systems (medical sector, figures)
- HP OpenView (NNM and ITO, network and system monitoring)
- Municipal government administration apps (GBA, Dutch government citizen's
  database)

In the field, we hardly encounter the web applications that seems to be
the focus of most people in the Linux HA space. This is partly a result
of our particular segment of the market. On the other hand, I am now
working with a customer where I proposed a four node cluster
(distributed across two locations, 9km apart) running Netscape web
servers and using a mix of MC/ServiceGuard and RRDNS for clustering and
load sharing.

I strongly think that for Linux to grow up as a clustering solution, it
must be able to support these business type apps as well, in addition to
web servers and other web related apps. I have booked some impressive
results with SteelEye Lifekeeper running a SAP/Oracle cluster on a
CompaQ CL380 2-node cluster with shared storage. The cost advantages of
such a solution over a traditional HP-UX/Solaris/Tru64 solution are
huge, making it interesting for test/dev environments (initially,
production environments later).

My 0.02 Euro.

++Jos


And thus it came to pass that Alan Robertson wrote:
(on Mon, Feb 05, 2001 at 09:45:38PM -0700 to be exact)

> What applications are people currently using HA technology to support?
> 
> What ones would you like to support?
> 
> 
> 	Thanks!
> 
> 	-- Alan Robertson
> 	   alanr@suse.com
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Linux HA Web Site:
>   http://linux-ha.org/
> Linux HA HOWTO:
>   http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/ALPHA/linux-ha/High-Availability-HOWTO.html
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- 
I have no need for a spirituality which can not encompass my humanness.