Genisys are working closely with a number of business partners, HP, IBM, and Microsoft to bring clustering solutions to our clients. Clustering promises to minimise downtime by providing an architecture that keeps the system running in the event of a single system failure. And additional systems can be added, allowing the cluster to grow and help users meet the overall processing power requirements of their networks.

The basic concept underlying server clustering is redundancy. The idea is that a system has more components than it actually needs, so that if one component fails, a spare or redundant component can take over.

Availability and scalability are two of the biggest areas of your network that need to be addressed in order to minimise downtime. Achieving high availability ensures that your system can run 24 x 7 x 365 by ensuring that failed components can be replaced easily, quickly and, most importantly, automatically.

Scalability allows you to grow your system as processing power requirements increase as well as dropping performance, an overloaded system is more prone to crashing than one that is only 50 per cent utilised. Clustering technology consists of linking together two or more servers to make your network more reliable. Clustering also improves scalability : if you need more power to support extra users or new applications, you simply add more servers to the cluster.

Clustering solutions are currently available from a number of hardware vendors, and are starting to be implemented as high availability server solutions, and now that Microsoft have released their clustering solution, previously called Wolfpack, clustering will become a much more common solution.

Server clustering is a fairly complex operation because functions, which normally take place in one server, have to be distributed over several servers. So there has to be a close match between the server hardware and the network operating system.

We consistently review the latest technological advances, and continually update the skill sets of its personnel. This enables us to provide the expertise required to propose, implement and support new technologies such as clustering, and therefore enable us to recommend a clustering solution that is best suited to your organisations requirements.