MB Worksoft Networking offers a secure environment to run business critical applications

With today`s rapidly changing business environment that requires an IT infrastructure that is flexible, expandable and extremely reliable, MBW Networking has announced that it offers support for UnixWare NonStop Clustering.

According to MBW Networking general manager, marketing and business development, Johann Botha, this dependency on IT has caused business critical computing users, as well as the new electronic commerce industry, to realise the need for a secure network infrastructure. "A successful, competitive enterprise cannot afford to be out of service for any period of time. Along with this, a basic change in business computing strategy is occurring - one where IT managers and line-of-business decision makers are increasingly turning towards more open standard and widely available hardware and software for their strategic computing platforms."

He says traditional fault tolerance has always required highly specialised hardware, operating systems, applications and middleware. "Typically this has meant proprietary systems, expensive peripherals, exorbitant maintenance costs and vendor lock-in."

Recently there has been a strong push by the computer industry to deliver more fault-resilient hardware products that include redundant power supplies, ECC memory, hot-pluggable devices, and communications devices that improve the availability of system services while also leveraging industry standard hardware platforms. However, this does not ensure availability of software and application services since studies show that hardware failures account for only 10 percent of system downtime.

UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters takes advantage of the proven reliability and power of UnixWare 7 systems as well as over 20 years of experience in fault-tolerant computing that Compaq`s Telco Division (formerly Tandem Computers, Ltd.) brings, to achieve large system scalability and high availability with unprecedented manageability for business critical computing. It is based on the field-tested reliability, scalability and performance of UnixWare 7, the industry standard UNIX system for Intel enterprise servers.

UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters delivers the best features of an ideal cluster system:

• Highly scalable, fault-tolerant operating environment that protects the application from faults and yet allows the application to operate anywhere on the cluster

• System that enables transparent capacity growth to keep with ever-increasing computing and data storage workloads

• Operational view of a single machine and a single system image

• Operating environment designed to reduce planned outages to zero

By utilising industry standard Intel enterprise servers, the standards-based UnixWare 7 operating system and widely available hardware and software products, UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters delivers levels of high availability and scalability that rival or exceed existing proprietary and RISC-based solutions at a fraction of their cost.

The ideal clustering platform offers users the ability to run all existing applications without modification, thus providing instant relief from transitioning to more powerful platforms as they become available or as demand for service increases.

The ideal system must provide the following:

• A safety net for both the data and applications resident on the system by providing a fault-tolerant environment to perform critical business processes such as customer care, billing, electronic commerce over the Internet, and decision support.

• Easy manageability with an operational environment that offers a simple, straightforward view of all the system resources and activities from any node in the cluster.

• An easy migration path for scaling to more powerful hardware and software without disruption of service to users.

• This is only possible if the system is designed from the ground up with continuous availability in mind. This approach maximises the hardware platform`s capabilities with the implementation of a fault-tolerant operating environment, cluster-wide load balancing, journaled files and online serviceability resulting in a system that is capable of supporting both planned and unplanned outages.

A unique capability of UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters is dynamic load balancing. Depending on the workload and available resources in the cluster, the system will automatically reassign processes among available nodes, delivering optimal overall performance. The cluster offers a single UNIX system name space and appears to the application as a very large n-way SMP server.

Botha says applications need not be cluster aware and may run unmodified in the cluster. "This single integrated view results in the best system and application scalability in the UNIX system market. The cluster supports the hot-pluggable addition of cluster nodes, application failover and active process migration, which allows any application process to be moved to another node between instruction steps."

With the unique single system image (SSI) capability of UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters, both applications and users view multiple nodes as a single, logical system. For manageability, no competitor claims to be selling a true single system image cluster similar to UnixWare needs nothing additional to manage the cluster. No new system management software.

"UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters is ideal for deploying in business critical environments where high availability is a requirement and the platform must be capable of handling growth in data storage, processing requirements as well as fluctuating workloads," he adds.

"With the widespread adoption of Internet technologies, intranet and internet servers are used more and more to publish corporate information to the external world or providing access to key company and client information via an intranet. With more users depending on such servers for such critical information, system uptime, capacity expansion, scalability as well as managing administration overhead is important. With Intel enterprise servers, UnixWare 7 NonStop Clusters delivers compelling value in terms of lower total cost of ownership and maximises investment protection."

For companies that have made a strategic commitment to Intel processor based systems, it offers unmatched capabilities in terms of high availability and scalability. Typical environments that can benefit from this kind of clustering solution include database and decision support systems; customer interaction and support systems; transaction processing for banking and other mission critical environments; retail In-store processor that services point of sale devices; datamart and data warehousing servers; intranet and Internet servers; and mail servers.