DEC-TruClusterProductsForUNIX

This document promotes Digital's TruCluster Software, a high-availability, high-performance computing solution designed to eliminate costly downtime and ensure near 100% availability for critical business operations running on AlphaServer systems with DIGITAL UNIX.

Key points:

• Problem Solved: Addresses the significant financial impact of downtime (which can cost businesses up to $1 million per hour), ensuring continuous productivity and customer satisfaction in a 24x365 business world.
• Core Functionality: TruCluster enables fault-resilient clustering, allowing organizations to distribute workloads, applications, databases, and operating systems across multiple processors. This maximizes uptime and ensures transparent, automatic failover in seconds if a component or network fails.
• Disaster Recovery: Supports disaster-tolerant clusters with nodes located miles apart, providing continuous computing even in the event of major incidents like fires or floods.

• Key Technologies:

  • Advanced File System (AdvFS): Ensures fast recovery and data integrity.
  • Logical Storage Manager (LSM): Provides storage failover protection, dynamic allocation, and performance optimization (RAID0/RAID1).
  • Networker: Offers high-performance shared tape backup capabilities with automatic failover during backup operations.

• Product Tiers:

  • TruCluster Available Server: Provides high availability and cost-effectiveness for up to four nodes, suitable for most demanding requirements.
  • TruCluster Production Server: Offers industry-leading performance in addition to high availability, supporting up to eight high-performance AlphaServer systems. It features the breakthrough MEMORY CHANNEL interconnect for extremely fast inter-cluster communication and supports commercial parallel database systems (like Oracle Parallel Server and Informix XPS) for enhanced database performance.

• Management: Both solutions offer an intuitive graphical management interface for simplified configuration, re-configuration, and dynamic workload balancing, reducing administrative costs.

• Benefits: Maximizes availability of critical applications, minimizes downtime with fast failover and rapid reboot, boosts system/database performance, allows continuous operation during maintenance and upgrades, lowers total cost of ownership, protects investments through scalability, and simplifies management.
• Implementation: Digital offers packaged solutions and professional services (Computer Special Systems) for design, integration, and testing, ensuring a ready-to-use cluster solution from day one.