IBM i Cluster technology

As companies strive to compete in today's environment, high availability has become essential to many businesses. The IBM® i cluster technology can be used to achieve high availability in IBM i environments. Cluster technology provides mechanisms that enable critical resources to be automatically available on backup systems. Those resources could include data, application programs, devices, or environment attributes.

In order for those business applications to be highly available, multiple systems might be required. This type of distributed computing environment can become complex to manage. A cluster can simplify this complexity. In IBM i, a cluster is a set or collection of systems or logical partitions, called cluster nodes. A cluster provides a means to monitor and manage the environment that provides high availability for the business application. A cluster can be a simple, two-node high availability environment for a specific business application or it can be a more complex, multiple system environment for multiple disjoint applications. A cluster might consist of many nodes, while a specific application might only be dependent on a subset of those nodes. An application on a node could fail without the entire node failing. Cluster technology provides the mechanisms for defining resilient resources in an environment, detecting outages, and responding to these failures. It provides the critical infrastructure that enables high availability solutions.