Chapter 2 Designing a Continental Cluster

Unlike metropolitan and campus clusters, which have a single-cluster architecture, a continental cluster uses multiple Serviceguard clusters to provide application recovery over local or wide area network (LAN and WAN). Using the Continentalclusters product, two independently functioning clusters are set up in such a way that in the event of a disaster, one cluster can take over the critical operations formerly carried out by the other cluster.

Disaster tolerance is obtained by eliminating the cluster itself as a single point of failure. This chapter describes the configuration and management of a basic continental cluster through the following topics:

Refer to Appendix D “Configuration File Parameters for Continentalclusters” and Appendix E “Continentalclusters Command and Daemon Reference” for additional information on the Continentalclusters command set and on configuration file parameters. For details of the cascading failover using HP StorageWorks or EMC Symmetrix disk arrays contact your HP representative.

	NOTE: This chapter briefly addresses data replication, highly available WANs, and site security and communication. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 give details on physical data replication using the HP StorageWorks Disk Array XP Series with Continuous Access XP, HP StorageWorks Disk Array EVA Series with Continuous Access EVA and the EMC Symmetrix with the SRDF facility.