Is Your Datacenter Ready When Disaster Strikes?
 Is your university datacenter ready when disaster strikes? Disasters arise not only from technology-related problems, such as application outages and hardware downtime, but also from environmental events that might affect a room, a building, or a region. The real effects of a disaster are often not felt immediately, with extended downtime often occurring downstream from actual events.
IT disaster planning continues to pose a major challenge for many colleges and universities. According to Kenneth Green, director of The Campus Computing Project, "Just over half (55.7 percent) of U.S. institutions report a strategic plan for IT disaster recovery, essentially unchanged from 2004 (55.5 percent) or even 2002 (53.0 percent)."
"One year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and five years after the 9-11 attacks, it is still surprising that so many colleges and universities have yet to complete or update their IT disaster plans," said Green.
January is the time to storm proof your datacenter. Sun recently announced new Solaris Cluster technology to make it easier and more cost-effective than ever for Education customers.
Clustered Approach
Sun's customers often take clustered approaches to maintaining continuity. Level 1, known as a local cluster, would have applications running on a single server; servers are then clustered to have multiple applications within a unified environment. This approach gives tolerance to an application should the hardware fail, in that the application can run on another server.
Moving up to a Level 2 approach entails stretching clusters into different rooms or buildings, maybe at considerable distances from one another. Moving further, to Level 3, entails separating clusters into geographically dispersed locations, where they can be managed in those locations to ensure continuity. Sun customers that adopt a clustered approach today receive specific and unique advantages.
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"The system's reliability has been outstanding. The use of clustering has achieved zero service loss during the year since we went live."
Alan Drain
Deputy Director, Information Technology Services
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland
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Solaris Cluster Software
In January, 2007 Sun unveiled the latest version of the Java Availability Suite that now includes Solaris Cluster software a multi-site disaster recovery solution and premier clustering and availability software platform. Sun Java Availability Suite helps customers to achieve and maintain high levels of datacenter availability across unlimited distances during planned maintenance, or in the event of an unplanned event, such as a failure or disaster.
Solaris Cluster provides high availability and global disaster recovery to suit the evolving needs of virtually any datacenter — across local distances, campuses or metropolitan areas, and across the world, ensuring business continuity without compromise. With out-of-the box support for the largest number of commercial and open source applications, open and flexible configurations for both horizontal and vertical scaling, integration with the Solaris kernel and support on both SPARC and x64 platforms, Solaris Cluster provides industrial-strength high availability to your applications.
The Solaris Cluster framework extends high availability features of Solaris — it includes Sun Cluster, Sun Cluster Geographic Edition, developer tools and support for commercial and open source applications through agents. It is the latest release of the tested and proven Sun Cluster software.
How Does Solaris Cluster Work?
By tightly coupling Sun's servers, storage and networking solutions, Solaris Cluster provides the maximum level of service availability and performance for a cluster system.
The servers (nodes) in a cluster communicate through private interconnects. These interconnects carry important cluster information (data as well as a cluster "heartbeat"). This heartbeat lets the servers in the cluster know the health of the other servers within the cluster, ensuring that each server is "alive."
If one of the servers goes offline and ceases its heartbeat, the rest of the devices in the cluster isolate the server and "fail over" any application or data from the failing node to another node. This failover process is done quickly and transparently to the users of the system. By exploiting the redundancy in the cluster, Solaris Cluster ensures the highest levels of availability.
What Is Sun Cluster Geographic Edition?
Sun Cluster Geographic Edition software enables a multi-site disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of application services and data across geographically dispersed Sun Clusters. In the event that a primary cluster goes down, Sun Cluster Geographic Edition enables systems administrators to start up the business services with replicated data on the secondary Sun Cluster.
How Can Education Customers Get Solaris Cluster Technology?
Sun offers several options for Education customers to test and deploy Solaris Cluster technology.
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Free Evaluation: Customers interested in evaluating the Sun Cluster 3.2 and Sun Cluster Geographic Edition 3.2 software are able to download these products as part of the Java Enterprise System evaluation program at no cost. To purchase support, however, customers must first purchase a license.
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Subscription Offering: Sun Java Availability Suite is an integrated software platform that delivers best-in-class high availability keeping global enterprises running 24x7 through planned maintenances, failures, wide area outages or disasters. Sun offers Education customers a 50 percent discount on this and other Sun Java Enterprise Suites. Sun Java Availability Suite consists of four components: |
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- Solaris Cluster Software: Provides application and service failover to help ensure high availability for mission-critical services running across up to 16 nodes.
- Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition Software: Delivers multi-site disaster tolerance, connecting clusters across unlimited distances.
- Solaris Cluster Agents: Manages the availability of applications. The Java Availability Suite offers the largest number of prebuilt agents for industry applications, as well as a toolkit to build agents for custom applications.
- Developer Tools: The Java Availability Suite contains the developer tools within the Sun Java Studio Enterprise and Sun Java Studio Creator.
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Perpetual License
Customers can purchase both Sun Cluster 3.2 and Sun Cluster Geographic Edition 3.2 products with their perpetual entitlements with support sold separately. Special deeply discounted price tiers have been created for Education customers.
When disaster strikes, will you be ready? Storm proof your datacenter with enterprise continuity solutions from Sun. Get your preparations under way with a free trial download of Sun Cluster software.
Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com
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