Clustered environment overview
Clusters consist of many components such as Tivoli® Storage Manager servers, hardware, and software. You can use clustering to join two or more servers or nodes by using a shared disk system.
This configuration provides the nodes with the ability to share
data, which allows higher server availability and minimized downtime.
For example:
- You can configure, monitor, and control applications and hardware components that are deployed on a cluster.
- You can use an administrative cluster interface and Tivoli Storage Manager to designate cluster arrangements and define a failover pattern. The server is part of the cluster that provides an extra level of security by ensuring that no transactions are missed because a server failed. The failover pattern that you establish prevents future failures.
- You can apply clustering to the node replication process. In this way, server availability is higher than it would be if node replication is used as a process on its own. Server availability is higher because a client is less likely to fail over to another server in a clustered environment. If you replicate data from several source replication servers to one target replication server, there is a high dependency on the target replication server. A clustered environment eases the dependency on the target replication server.
Components in a server cluster are known as cluster objects.
Cluster objects are associated with a set of properties that have
data values that describe the identity and behavior of an object in
the cluster. Cluster objects can include the following components:
- Nodes
- Storage
- Services and applications
- Networks