Compaq AA-RHGWB-TE manual Introduction, TruCluster Server Product

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Introduction

This chapter introduces the TruCluster Server product and some basic cluster hardware configuration concepts.

Subsequent chapters describe how to set up and maintain TruCluster Server hardware configurations. See the TruCluster Server Software Installation manual for information about software installation; see the TruCluster Server Cluster Administration manual for detailed information about setting up member systems and highly available applications.

1.1 The TruCluster Server Product

TruCluster Server, the newest addition to the Compaq Tru64 UNIX TruCluster Software products family, extends single-system management capabilities to clusters. It provides a clusterwide namespace for files and directories, including a single root file system that all cluster members share. It also offers a cluster alias for the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) so that a cluster appears as a single system to its network clients.

TruCluster Server preserves the availability and performance features found in the earlier TruCluster products:

•Like the TruCluster Available Server Software and TruCluster Production Server products, TruCluster Server lets you deploy highly available applications that have no embedded knowledge that they are executing in a cluster. They can access their disk data from any member in the cluster.

•Like the TruCluster Production Server Software product, TruCluster Server lets you run components of distributed applications in parallel, providing high availability while taking advantage of cluster-specific synchronization mechanisms and performance optimizations.

TruCluster Server augments the feature set of its predecessors by allowing all cluster members access to all file systems and all storage in the cluster, regardless of where they reside. From the viewpoint of clients, a TruCluster Server cluster appears to be a single system; from the viewpoint of a system administrator, a TruCluster Server cluster is managed as if it were a single system. Because TruCluster Server has no built-in dependencies on the architectures or protocols of its private cluster interconnect or shared storage

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