Sun offers help for server clusters

Sun Microsystems has finally released its Sun Cluster 3.0 software designed to improve the scalability and management of clustered servers.

The company also unveiled Sun Management Centre 3.0, which it claims intelligently identifies all the components of a cluster and allows network operators to view the system from a single interface. The software includes web access, group administration, enhanced alarm management and online hardware diagnostics.

Sun acknowledged that its Sun Cluster 2.2 software was short of the mark in functionality, and that version 3.0 was delayed by several months. Some analysts believe this was caused by the complexity of the technology that works around the Solaris operating system and other system software, hardware and network infrastructures.

The software features fail-over technology, which allows a server cluster to continue to perform if one or more servers go down, as well as built-in load balancing. It allows companies to monitor multiple nodes within a cluster from a single console, a function that previously had to be managed separately.

Brad Day, an analyst at researcher Giga, said: "Essentially, what Sun has done is provide a higher level of availability to the hardware devices and bring that same up-time level of assurance to the IP address and the data and applications."

Ed Zander, Sun's president and chief operating officer, said: "The products and services announced today will form the software backbone of Sun's continued advances into the data centre and help drive the company's growth for the next five years."

Even though Sun is a dominant Unix server vendor, other manufacturers have taken a similar approach to clustering and claim that Sun Cluster 3.0 lags behind many of its rivals' products. Hewlett Packard (HP) said it has been providing clustering for its enterprise Unix customers for more than five years. Compaq and IBM also offer Unix clustering and Microsoft offers Windows clustering.

While Sun is focused on Solaris and its proprietary Sparc architecture, HP said it can integrate Sun file systems within HP-UX to deliver heterogeneous solutions covering multiple operating systems, including Unix, Windows and Linux.

Sun's new cluster software shares jobs among as many as eight nodes in a cluster. HP said its MC/ServiceGuard software can accommodate 16 nodes, while IBM boasts 32.