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Network World: Novell plans to outcluster Windows NT

“NetWare Cluster Services for NetWare 5 will ship by the end of
September. It might slow the migration of high-availability
applications to Windows NT. Previously codenamed Orion II, the
software is one of the first clustering products on the Intel
platform to support more than two server nodes.

NetWare Cluster Services has been tested on
clusters of up to eight 4-processor servers
and will
support as many as 32
clustered servers in the future.
Microsoft Cluster Server on NT
, its competitor at present,
supports two 4- or 8-processor servers and Windows
2000… DataCenter
will support up to four 8-processor
servers
and will ship in the second quarter of 2000.

NetWare Cluster Services works with Novell Directory Services
and any application software certified by Novell for NetWare
5.”

“When a node in the cluster fails or is unavailable, any node
can take over all the applications and resources of the failed
node. Failures and recovery may occur automatically or manually as
designated by the IT manager. Manual failovers are useful for
maintenance and testing operations. When the failed node is
available again, a mechanism called failback occurs.

In addition, servers using NetWare Cluster Services can be
load-balanced. Load-balancing is a feature that is increasingly
important as Web servers are clustered to speed access to the
Internet, according to James Gruener, an analyst with the Aberdeen
Group in Boston, Mass.”

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