“If you’re looking for good news on the clustering front, you’ll
find it in several areas. Scientific cluster computing ala Beowulf
continues to grow and bring out products from old and new hardware
vendors alike. Protocol clusters are finally emerging on the
commercial front from vendors such as TurboLinux and Resonate. And
other serious server management tools such as Tivoli Enterprise
Management and Computer Associates’s Unicenter are starting to
appear on the horizon as well.
But the best cluster product on the show floor at the recent
LinuxWorld Conference & Expo wasn’t a Linux system at all. …
This was the Compaq Tru64 Unix cluster system, formerly Digital
Unix clustering. …Tru64 sets the standard that Linux and
other vendors should aim to meet, despite the long hard road it
will take to get there.”
“Clustering enables scalability. Symetric multiprocessing
systems scale by adding more processors, higher speed buses, and
increased memory, which significantly increases the complexity and
price of the system. Clusters, on the other hand, use standard
off-the-shelf components to build systems that are incrementally
faster. And they do so without the significant additional expense
of SMP systems…”
“parallel-computing clusters like Beowulf have a limited appeal
to businesses when compared to the much simpler solution offered by
failover clustering — which is already available with Compaq Tru64
clusters, Novell InterNetWare, and Microsoft Cluster Server.”