Success in a Box
In the beginning, I had a little trouble setting up the clustering software, largely because of sub-par documentation and my eagerness to test the system. I strongly recommend that anyone considering this solution pay for the support contract available from Data General, at least for the initial installation. However, after I configured everything, this unit performed flawlessly. I failed over the two systems more than 50 times without problems. Of all the systems we tested, the Data General was the most reliable.
I did encounter a problem with the video switch freezing up occasionally. I solved this problem by not switching back and forth between servers during the initial boot process. In addition, the rack-mounted Barracuda drives had some problems initially as a result of the mounting tracks on the drive units being too long. Data General is aware of this problem and supplied a replacement part.
If you need to implement a clustering solution now and are worried about the future, Data General has you covered. The company has announced its support for Wolfpack on NT Cluster-in-a-Box. Data General is testing Wolfpack beta versions now. The Data General NT Cluster-in-a-Box provides high availability (97 percent or greater uptime) rather than fault tolerance (100 percent uptime). You must make sure your applications can reestablish a connection to a server in case of failover. Another point worth mentioning is that NT Cluster-in-a-Box allows for failover for routine maintenance, giving you even higher availability. If the system fails over four times a month (twice for a system failure, failing over and back, and twice for routine maintenance), and each failover means 30 seconds of downtime, the total is 1440 seconds of downtime a year, or less than 0.00005 percent downtime (greater than 99.99 percent uptime).
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