Sun Microsystems Inc. in 2004 plans to boost its enterprise clustering product by fitting it with high-availability capabilities now used in telecommunications applications, a Sun official said this week.
Capabilities from the Sun Netra HA (High Availability) Suite, including checkpointing for fast recovery and the cluster membership API for understanding what nodes are part of a cluster, are to be moved over to the Sun Cluster package, said David Nelson-Gal, vice president of Sun’s availability products group, based in Menlo Park, Calif. Nelson spoke during a Sun event in San Jose, Calif., Tuesday evening held in connection with the ClusterWorld conference.
Netra HA Suite has been deployed in telecommunications applications while Sun Cluster provides for general-purpose clustering in enterprise environments, according to Sun.
“We’re converging the technology base,” Nelson-Gal said.
Also to be moved to Sun Cluster is event mechanisms. “If you have an application on multiple nodes, this is a way of establishing communications between nodes in a cluster,” said Nelson-Gal.
Sun, with its clustering plan, is looking to boost levels of availability for applications such as application servers, Nelson-Gal said.
Jean Bozman, research vice-president for global enterprise server solutions at IDC in Mountain View, Calif., said high availability is becoming more of a requirement in applications such as Web environments and e-business.
“In a lot of these businesses, those levels of high availability were not necessary even five years ago,” Bozman said.