Introduction to Storage Networking
Server Clustering
Server Clustering
Users
Heartbeat
Servers
Storage Storage
Subsystem SAN Switch Subsystem
• Server access to common storage resources
• Failure of a single server still provides data access
• Simplified storage resource management
Server clustering is one of the first and most prevalent SAN applications
because it requires that multiple servers have access to common storage
resources.
The early clustering architectures used a heartbeat between the cluster
members to determine if a host member was available and functional.
Newer cluster architectures use a common disk area to determine host
member availability and functionality. This could be a quorum disk or
alternatively it could rely on the SCSI reservation settings for this
determination.