Novell Inc yesterday announced the beta availability of its directory-enabled Novell Cluster Services for NetWare 5. The networking giant demonstrated the technology, which enables up to 12 nodes to be connected in a cluster, at its BrainShare conference last week in Utah.
The technology is designed to reduce downtime by allowing other server nodes in the cluster to take over services and applications from failed servers. If a clustered server fails, applications running on that server are automatically restarted on another server in the cluster and users are transparently migrated to the new server without suffering any downtime.
Currently, Novell only has solutions that enable one or multiple servers to failover to a single active server, which means if more than one server goes down in the cluster, the network will suffer downtime. The main difference with its next generation clustering architecture is the close integration with NDS (Novell Directory Services). Novell said its Cluster Services directly leverages NDS by storing all cluster configuration information within the directory. Instead of using scripts to determine the response to a server failure, cluster services uses NDS to store and distribute failover scenario information, which is available through the directory to all servers in the cluster. รก
