January 9, 2007 - Long gone are the days of kick-starting the server in the event of software or hardware failures or operator errors. With your core business processes online and your employees and customers demanding access 24x7, the notion of business continuity takes on a completely different meaning these days.

With support for the broadest portfolio of applications in the industry, extensive choice of Sun and third-party storage solutions, availability on Solaris for both SPARC and x64 platforms, and new functionality leveraging the latest Solaris 10 innovations including Solaris Containers and Predictive Self- Healing, Solaris Cluster is the premier business continuity and disaster recovery platform for the Solaris Operating System.

"In today's business climate, the switch from 9-to-5 to 24-by-7 may be old news, but we're seeing newer consequences to not meeting uptime requirements," says Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris, Sun Microsystems. "Regulatory issues may mean fines for downtime. Conversely we're seeing insurers reacting favorably when you can demonstrate you've taken positive steps to increase uptime."

Solaris Cluster is used to improve the availability of software services such as databases, file sharing on a network, electronic commerce Web sites, or other applications. It protects against downtime by eliminating the server, storage, network, interconnect, OS and the application itself as the points of failure for your application, service, or database. Solaris Cluster operates by having up to 16 redundant computers or nodes where one or more nodes continue to provide service if another fails. It not only monitors your applications, it protects them against a wide variety of failures as well.

Business Continuity Goes Global

With Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, clusters can be located in datacenters distributed geographically around the world to provide redundancy. This ensures that your business stays up and running even in the event of a natural or man-made disaster which can take a datacenter offline.

"We've heard so many stories where the one thing that never should happen, did happen," said Keith White, director of Engineering for Solaris Cluster. "People tend to think in terms of hardware failures, but it could be a software glitch or even an unexpected network outage that takes down the datacenter—Solaris Cluster can keep your application running in the face of any of this."

This latest version comes with a number of improvements including support for Live Upgrade and Single-Step Upgrade to eliminate downtime while upgrading the cluster and a new user interface. New configuration wizards make it easier to deploy the cluster software and help eliminate system configuration errors.

Virtualize Your Applications and Maximize Your Cluster Resources

Solaris Containers is a unique virtualization and resource management application feature available with Solaris 10. By leveraging Solaris Containers, customers can safely combine applications running on multiple servers onto a single server and a single instance of Solaris to deliver up to 80 percent server utilization.

With this latest release of Solaris Clusters, applications running within a container can now benefit from the increased availability offered by Solaris Clusters. Containers with one or more applications or multiple resource groups can now be failed-over independently to different containers and nodes in the cluster.

The Business Continuity Solution for Oracle RAC

Solaris Cluster Advanced Edition for Oracle RAC is the industry's most complete high availability offering for Oracle databases. With built-in support for Sun's Cluster File System, QFS, and support for multiple redundant interconnects, Quorum Server and I/O Fencing the Advanced Edition provides improved scalability, eliminates single points of failure, and helps to maintain data integrity for Oracle RAC deployments.

"We have worked to certify the Sun Cluster for Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters, so that our joint customers can feel assured of the integrity and high availability delivered by Oracle Real Application Clusters on Solaris 10," says Prem Kumar, vice president, Server Technologies at Oracle.

Broadest Portfolio of Applications and Choice of Hardware

Solaris Cluster offers built-in support for the broadest range of commercial and open source applications in the industry, including products from Oracle, Siebel, SAP and Sybase, and Web tier solutions such as Apache and PostgreSQL. For customers who want to safeguard applications they've developed in house, it's simple to integrate them with Solaris Cluster. An easy-to-use toolkit is provided to guide developers or administrators through the creation of custom agents.

Solaris Cluster works with a broad range of hardware, as well. In addition to being supported on SPARC and x64 systems, Sun provides an extensive choice of storage infrastructure. Sun's Open Storage Program ensures customers that along with Sun Storage Solutions, a wide range of third-party storage arrays are supported with Solaris Cluster. Customers who have invested in storage from any number of industry vendors including Sun, EMC, Hitachi and NetApp can do so easily and seamlessly.

With this latest version customers can take advantage of industry-leading data replication software from Sun, Hitachi and EMC to manage their Solaris Cluster environments across multiple data centers.

With more supported applications, more support for Sun and third-party storage, and availability on the Solaris for SPARC and Solaris for x64 platforms, Solaris Cluster can be now be deployed in more datacenter environments, ranging from simple local one- or two-node clusters to, multiple wide-area network connected clusters, running SPARC or x64 servers.

For more information on Solaris Cluster, please visit http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/cluster/index.xml
For more information on the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Learning Center, please visit http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/business_learning_center.jsp