Of all the responsibilities borne by IT departments, ensuring the availability of mission-critical applications, services, and data is arguably both the most important and the most challenging. One technology that helps IT organizations meet uptime requirements for their essential systems is failover clustering (FC), in which servers are linked together so if one node fails, another in its cluster can pick up its functions.
Until recently, the implementation of failover clustering has been a kind of “dark art” that required a high degree of IT expertise to implement. So although the concept of clustering has been around for decades, until now it has been practical only for organizations that had extensive IT resources to administer and manage.
Microsoft has changed that picture in two important ways:
• The simplified failover clustering management capability of Microsoft’s recently released Windows Server 2008 operating system makes FC practical and easy to implement for a wider set of customers, including organizations with fewer than 250 computers.
• By establishing the Failover Clustering Configuration Program (FCCP), under which Microsoft partners with key cluster vendors to ensure that pre-configured cluster configurations are strenuously tested for efficacy and ease of installation.
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