Downtime no more

Server clustering and virtualization give users a better road to dependability.

When MLT Vacations scrapped its pricey Sun hardware for a cluster of IBM Linux blade servers to support its Oracle database, it expected to see savings. But the company got something even more: a database environment it truly could depend on 24/7.

That was "icing on the cake," says Chris Corona, manager of systems services for the online provider of travel packages, in Edina, Minn.

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When MLT Vacations scrapped its pricey Sun hardware for a cluster of IBM Linux blade servers to support its Oracle database, it expected to see savings. But the company got something even more: a database environment it truly could depend on 24/7.

That was "icing on the cake," says Chris Corona, manager of systems services for the online provider of travel packages, in Edina, Minn.

Emerging clustering and virtualization technologies can bring high-end capabilities to low-priced, standards-based servers that have been pumped up with performance and reliability improvements. In turn, IT managers get a wider choice when it comes to mapping business  continuity plans. Many, like Corona, are finding that the tools they've selected to make the data center more dynamic - and, interestingly, to cut costs - are creating a more reliable environment to support critical-business processes. Should a failure occur, applications that aren't tied to the hardware on which they run easily can be moved from one virtual server to another or within a cluster.

"When you thought about business continuity, you used to think replicated servers, replicated data and separate physical machines," says Joe Clabby, an analyst with Summit Strategies. "Now you think resource pool."

At International Truck and Engine, a Warrenville, Ill., manufacturer, IT Manager Barry Naber keeps applications running smoothly using VMware's VMotion. This tool lets users move virtual machines among physical servers.

"We brought VMware in for server consolidation and realized it's much bigger than that. It's also business continuity," Naber says. "With VMotion, if one server within our VMware farm is getting hit more heavily than the others, we can move users over to another server unbeknownst to them and allow the application to function without having to take the server down. Before, end users would have experienced an outage."

International Truck and Engine has about 150 VMware partitions running on less than a dozen servers. The company has avoided about $1 million in hardware costs, Naber says.

The tech choices

While VMware, now an EMC company, largely created the virtualization market for x86 servers, others, such as Microsoft, SWsoft and the open source virtualization project Xen, now offer alternatives. IBM, HP and Sun also provide tools to make virtualization and clustering simpler to deploy in enterprise data centers. And clustering tools aimed at making it easier to tie together disparate systems are available from companies such as Emic Networks, Neverfail Group, Penguin Computing, PolyServe and Qlusters.

"What you'll see is more and more integration of all these types of technologies, which lend themselves to more choice and more capabilities within the IT infrastructure for doing business continuity," says Jim Sangster, director of N1 and availability marketing for Sun. "What typically has only been available on mainframe-class systems - well, now we can do it on a cheap little Opteron box."