Clustering software keeps NetWare humming

NetWare 5.1 users looking to boost the fault tolerance of their servers may want to check out Novell's upcoming release of clustering software.

Available at the end of March, NetWare Cluster Services (NCS), the company's server clustering software, will include support for Novell's NetWare 5.1 application server environment and several new features users say are important in keeping their networks operating. The release is now in private beta testing.

Novell introduced NCS for NetWare 5 networks last fall. NCS increases network availability by tying together up to 32 Intel processor-based servers to create a cluster. The clustered servers have access to shared disk volumes over a Fibre Channel link and can back each other up if one node fails. All improvements apply to NetWare 5 servers, as well.

Perhaps the most important new feature of NCS is its ability to let one server take over for others in the event of a failure. "My users have molded their daily routines around e-mail," says John Haynes, director of network services at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Va. "Clustering will be a big help in providing maximum uptime for my NetWare-based GroupWise servers. It will be a boon for the front-end servers that are running Novell Enterprise Web Server as well."

One NCS feature will let net managers take servers down for maintenance purposes without interrupting operations, says Ward Cook, data processing programming lead at the University of Maryland in College Park. "Clustering gives us better maintenance times," he says.

Cook can cluster two servers and take one offline while the other takes over operations. "It reduces the number of people banging down our doors to see what's going on when one of the more critical servers does go down," he says.

"Today, I have 20 servers that need hardware disk upgrades at some point or another," says Mike Glassman, security and systems administrator for the Israeli Airport Authority in Tel Aviv. "The downtime of even a few hours to install, move data and so on is sometimes not possible to handle. A few of our systems are 24-7 systems, and downtime has to be at a minimum."

Glassman will also use NCS to eliminate a single point of failure on his network. "No longer will I have only one server as the logon point. If the server fails or is down, it no longer matters,"he says.

In addition, the new version of NCS will let a network manager failover the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server in the event of a problem, thereby improving availability. DHCP automatically assigns IP addresses to users seeking access to the Internet.

"DHCP is one of those core services that companies rely on for IP address management," says John Kretz, chairman and president of Enlightened Point Consulting Group in Phoenix.

"When a server goes down, the other DHCP servers have no way of being alerted that they must fill in for the down server, nor do they have a record of what IP addresses have been assigned," Mary Washington College's Haynes says. "You can have your hands full trying to correct all of the duplicate IP addresses that a replacement DHCP server assigns."

Novell declined to comment on pricing for NCS.