Hello from the Storage Foundation/High Availability Technical Product Management team, and welcome to the new Symantec Connect! In this first VCS blog entry under the new format, we'll take a look at reducing the cost of HA by building larger, more "intelligent" clusters.
When most people think of clustering, they think of a 2-node, active/passive cluster in which a mission-critical application runs on one system (the active node) while a stand-by system (passive node) is ready to take over if something fails on the active node. This approach works fine in an environment with one or maybe two mission-critical applications, but consider the costs of this approach in an environment with 10 or 15 or 20 mission-critical applications.
To avoid the costs of excessive hardware sparing, an "N+1" approach is often implemented in which "N" represents the number of active nodes and "+1" represents a single spare (idle) server....