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Introducing Veritas Cluster Server One: Part 2

DLamorena
Level 3

Symantec's Dan Lamorena, Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Eric Hennessey, Director, Technical Product Management, continue their introduction of Veritas Cluster Server One and further explain its value in providing high availability in a multi-tiered, multi-platform application environment.

Eric: Another critical element of Veritas Cluster Server One (VCS One) is the ability to manage virtualized environments such as VMware, Solaris Containers and LDOMs, IBM mPars, and others. Most of these platforms have their own "high availability (HA)" solutions; however, these solutions don't have some of the enterprise-ready features that customers require like rich application monitoring and failover. Further, these HA solutions only work on that particular platform and most IT organizations have a mix of Windows, Unix, and server virtualization in their data centers. This means that the IT organization has different tools on different platforms leading to extra personnel and training costs to manage the entire HA infrastructure.

Dan: Veritas Cluster Server One makes a giant leap in traditional clustering and high availability. IT organizations can now use a single product to manage across their physical and virtual, multi-platform data center. And with the increasing complexity of applications - in some cases the web server or application server may reside in a virtual machine, while the database may be on a physical server, organizations can now provide high availability for the entire IT service, even if part of it is running in virtual servers.

Eric: Veritas Cluster Server One's virtualization support also helps customers reduce the amount of spare servers it needs to purchase for high availability. VCS One allows administrators to assign applications a priority. For example, a mission critical workload may be a Tier 1 application, while a test/dev application may be a Tier 4. This allows customers to repurpose their test/dev servers to be failover targets for production workloads. In the event of a server failure, the test/dev system could be shut down, and the production application could be started in its place. This allows companies to truly get the benefits of consolidating - reduced capital expenditures. You can also leverage the capabilities that are coming out in new hardware in terms of capacity on demand, like what's available with IBM's Dynamic Logical Partitions (DLPARs). With VCS One, you'll be able to "light up" the proper amount of CPU and memory resources when starting an application, then de-allocate those resources upon shutdown...turning the lights out when you leave the room, as it were.

Dan: The product is also designed to reduce the operational pain usually associated with high availability solutions. Administration with Veritas Cluster Server One is designed to be easy. It provides a single front end so you can manage all the applications running in your environment that you are authorized to view, or just the one you care about. So if you log in to VCS One and you belong to the IT group responsible for marketing, for example, you will only see those servers and applications that belong to marketing and will have full control of those applications. You can tell them to start, stop, move, and more. That's in addition to the traditional high availability functions that are still happening on the backend where if something breaks, Veritas Cluster Server One will move that application from one server to another.

Veritas Cluster Server One will be available on October 6, 2008.