∙The following multi-instance applications may benefit from a CFS by improving scalability (by adding additional instances to additional cluster nodes):

–Web Server Farms: Web servers are particularly suitable for a CFS cluster because their application is typically read-only. Moreover, with a client load-balancing front end, a web server cluster’s capacity can be expanded by adding a server and another copy of the site. A CFS-based cluster greatly simplifies scaling and administration for this type of application. Before CFS, scaling a web server beyond one node meant choosing between two sub-optimal solutions:

–Using NFS to share the data among the nodes had the advantage that only storage for one set of data had to be provisioned and NFS kept the data in sync automatically among all nodes. The drawback was the performance.

–Using individual copies of the data for each web server provided adequate performance, but at the price of provisioning the storage multiple times and putting manual processes in place to synchronize data updates among the nodes. HP previously used this setup internally for the hp.com website but has since successfully implemented a CFS to reduce the storage costs by two-thirds without having an impact on performance.

–File Servers: Two or more servers can be connected to the same CFS storage and share file system data to increase availability and scalability. Some examples are:

–Multiple DNS servers in a CFS cluster are all accessing the same CFS data, but each of them only serves a certain subset of that data to the clients.

–Streaming media servers can easily scale up, adding nodes to the cluster serving the same files on a CFS.

–Highly available NFS servers can benefit from CFS. At initial release of the HA-NFS toolkit, the complexity of configuring cross-mounts can be avoided using CFS to share the data within the cluster and NFS to the outside. In the future HP plans that highly available NFS servers will also be able to exploit CFS for scalability.

–Multi-instance shared-nothing databases, such as Informix XPS or DB/2, may benefit from CFS for ease of administration.

The SGCFS is a good option for TruCluster (including Advanced File System (AdvFS) and Logical Storage Manager (LSM)) users who want to transition a non-Oracle environment from Tru64 to HP-UX.

Note

If you are interested in the OEs, HP recommends ordering one of the OEs with SGCFS because some of Serviceguard CFS products are already included in the OEs.

For existing HP-UX users who already have Serviceguard or the MCOE and want to upgrade to a Serviceguard Storage Management Suite bundle, contact your HP representative for more details.

19