Making Applications and Services Highly Available

  • Article

A server failure in any organization can be extremely costly, whether the server is a file, print, Web, or application server. Measuring the costs of server, application, or service downtime in any organization can be difficult. Potential losses can include:

  • Lost sales

  • Lost customer goodwill

  • Lost employee productivity and confidence

  • Increased costs due to makeup time

  • Missed contractual obligations or possible legal liabilities

  • Perishable products going to waste

  • Loss of competitiveness

The costs that your organization can accrue due to the interruption of a mission-critical application or service could be extremely high. If you are not making mission-critical applications and services highly available to your users you are taking a high-priced risk.

This chapter discusses the details of deployment planning for Windows Clustering. Clustering is a feature of Windows 2000 Advanced Server that provides four main benefits for networks and for system administrators:

  • High availability of applications and services.

  • Scalability of specific applications and services (when using load balancing).

  • Centralized administration.

  • Rolling upgrade (the process of upgrading cluster nodes individually while the other nodes continue to provide service).