Sun cluster/sup TM/ architecture: a white paper

A well designed cluster system can provide highly available access to applications, system resources and data, together with other features such as scalability and single system image. This paper describes Sun Cluster/sup TM/, a clustering solution from Sun Microsystems that is designed to provide these features. The focus of the paper is on the architectural components of Sun Cluster that enable its single-system image capability, namely, its global networking, cluster file system and global devices components. As will be seen in the paper single-system image is a key feature that enables many of the other goals of a good cluster design, and various components of a clustering infrastructure need to be architected to work together to provide a single-system image.