Features & Benefits
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| Infinite Scalability for "On-Demand" Businesses |
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Traditional cluster management software have a limited number of nodes in a cluster. This will be no longer to cope with the future trend that moves to "scale-out" model, more servers instead of a big server. ShaoLin InfiniCluster addresses this issue with a completely new designed cluster framework, ShaoLin General Parallel Cluster Infrastructure (SGPCI), a truly distributed server-less cluster infrastructure with infinite scalability. The number of nodes in a cluster are not limited, more computing resources can be added into the cluster for the future growth of business. ShaoLin InfiniCluster can deliver enterprises the most scalable cluster infrastructure to meet the "on-demand" business requirements.
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| Simplified Server Consolidation |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster meets high availability and server consolidation requirements by enabling active servers in the cluster to take over failed applications. It allows "active-active" and "N+M" cluster configurations for maximum availability to save the cost of a dedicated spare server per application. IT personnel now can make the most consolidated and fault-tolerance server environments.
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| Monitoring for All Computing Resources |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster detects faults from both system level and application level computing resources, such as specific application, the associated database, operating system, file system, network and storage resources. When a failure occurs, ShaoLin InfiniCluster does not require a full server power-down, but automatically shuts down the protected application, restarts it on an available server in the cluster, connects it to the appropriate network and storage device, and resumes normal operations quickly without human intervention to minimize impact on users productivity. ShaoLin InfiniCluster provides maximum protection and allows optimum system uptime by eliminating unplanned downtime and facilitating trouble-shooting. |
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| Out-of-the-box Support for Applications |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster gives off-the-shelf support for a wide range of applications, databases and network services by Service Monitoring Agents (SMAs) which provide application level monitoring and recovery to ensure maximized application uptime and compatibility. New SMAs are continually being developed to support upcoming new applications. SMA development kit is also available for end users to create custom SMA for their custom-build applications.
Please see the list of available SMA's here.
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| Parallel Multi-Instance Applications Support |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster meets the need of managing the availability of distributed applications, such as parallel database, load-balanced clustered web servers, parallel MPI applications and grid applications. It manages parallel application to mix with normal applications in a cluster as a single environment and supporting N+M configuration to minimize redundancy. ShaoLin InfiniCluster also maintains and controls minimum or maximum number of application instances in a cluster to guarantee application performance. In the event of a failure, it will move application instance to the most appropriate server to ensure service level of application and efficient server utilization. In addition, ShaoLin InfiniCluster supports to add or remove application instance online without stopping the cluster or application for flexibility.
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| Advanced Virtual Machine Support |
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Virtualization technologies are commonly used to increase data center utilization, multiple virtual machines and applications can be hosted on a single physical server. A failure of that physical server can lead to a loss of availability for several applications. Therefore, high availability service is necessary to increase the manageability of virtual machines. ShaoLin InfiniCluster provides clustering support for mixed physical and virtual systems environment. It can also monitor application running within virtual machine, and failover application between virtual machines in the event of a failure.
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| Reliable Cluster Communication and Accurate Fault Detection |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster detects hardware component and application faults in advance of a full system failure through multiple fault detection mechanisms. With the state-of-the-art SGPCI, ShaoLin InfiniCluster uses multi-channel and kernel-to-kernel cluster communication (heartbeat) for fault detection. This heartbeat is a crash-safe process that works reliably in low memory and extreme conditions, and working independent and transparent to applications and user context. It is fully event driven by using peer-to-peer mechanism rather than broadcast mechanism which has delay, result in very fast reaction on switchover or failover. In addition, it supports various type of communication channels, including IP, raw Ethernet, and serial port.
Due to the fault detection process of most clustering solutions requiring a lot of system resources, an suddenly increased application load can cause monitoring process to hang up. In this case, the cluster software will make a false failover decision, but as all other applications in the system are actually running, then the whole system will crash. Therefore, in order to eliminate the self vulnerabilities of other user-space cluster software, ShaoLin InfiniCluster provides reliable and redundant cluster communications which ensures accurate fault detection and avoids false failover. |
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Multi-path cluster communication |
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| Intelligent Failover and QoS Management |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster supports policy-based, cascading, multi-directional and load-balanced failover to ensure continuous operations based on user requirements and predetermined schemes. With the system load and health monitoring tool of ShaoLin InfiniCluster, IT personnel can set failover policy based on server capacity. It determines the best server to host a specific application at the time of startup or failure based on the current state of resources in the cluster. This feature ensures that server resources are utilized as efficient as possible, and achieves optimum load distribution throughout the cluster.
By continuous monitoring of server load, administrator can preset maximum load threshold of the service group to ensure the QoS (Quality of Service) of the application. In the event of DOS (Denial Of Service attack) or run away applications where server load will be abnormally high, the application can be migrated and restarted at another server in the cluster automatically based on predetermined policies. |
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Intelligent Server Workload Management and QOS Management: In the event of a fault or abnormal condition, ShaoLin InfiniCluster makes intelligent decisions regarding application failover by monitoring server capacity thresholds and available resources on alternate servers. |
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| Easy to Install and Configure, and Online Maintenance |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster is simple and easy to install, configure, use and maintain comparing to other clustering solutions. The painless installation and out-of-the-box compatibility for applications and Linux OS reduces time to deployment and cuts consulting costs. ShaoLin InfiniCluster can temporarily move applications to a standby server in the cluster during planned system maintenance, upgrades or patches that the primary server be taken offline. It also provides flexibility for adding or removing servers in a cluster without bringing the cluster or applications offline. As a result, ShaoLin InfiniCluster easily minimizes planned downtime providing continuous operations of business-critical applications for maximum productivity.
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| Multi-Cluster Management and Reporting |
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With the intuitive graphical management console of ShaoLin InfiniCluster, users can easily monitor and manage different type of applications and heterogeneous servers in multiple clusters and data centers that span across multiple sites at a single location. This console increases administrator efficiency on cluster operations and maintenance, centralizes control of applications, and reports the availability status of each computing resources. It avoids human error by simplifying and automating routine tasks, and helps to investigate problems by tracking management history of all the managed clusters. In addition, failures and event notification will be alerted to system administrators instantly via email or SNMP.
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster Java_based GUI provides flexible configuration of a wide range of application-dependent resources. |
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| Multi-Platform and Mixed Linux OS Support |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster runs on most of the commercial Linux OSes on multiple platforms with the latest kernel releases. It supports from a single core 32-bit processor to a multi-core 64-bit processor, including IA32/64, EM64T, AMD32/64, x86 compatible 32/64 and Power32/64 architectures. ShaoLin InfiniCluster also allows a cluster that consists of servers in different Linux OSes, processor types and hardware configurations. It provides the scalability and flexibility to meet different requirements of different customers. |
Typical mixed Linux cluster managed by ShaoLin InfiniCluster |
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| Comprehensive Hardware, Storage and Replication Support |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster supports a wide range of heterogeneous hardware and storage configurations, including Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and shared RAID. It also support most hardware, software and database replication technologies. ShaoLin Volume Replicator will be an ideal option to work with ShaoLin InfiniCluster to guarantee both data and application availability for disaster recovery plan. ShaoLin InfiniCluster is transparent to use standard storage software technologies, such as Linux multi-disk driver (software RAID), EVMS, and the Logical Volume Manager (LVM). Organizations can deploy clustering to their current infrastructure with mixed servers, storage and standard software technologies.
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| Load-Balanced Data Center Environment |
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A complete fault-tolerance and load-balanced data center infrastructure can be built by integrating ShaoLin InfiniCluster with ShaoLin Load Balancer. ShaoLin Load Balancer is a application acceleration solution for web-enabled and IP-based business applications. It can perform load distribution based on real runtime CPU load of back-end servers which manage by ShaoLin InfiniCluster for performance optimization throughout the cluster. As a result, the availability and performance of applications can be guaranteed.
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| Part of a Total Disaster Recovery Plan |
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ShaoLin InfiniCluster integrates with ShaoLin Volume Replicator to be a total disaster recovery solution. By using the replication of ShaoLin Volume Replicator, applications running on ShaoLin InfiniCluster are allowed to be stopped and restarted in remote location over any IP-based network with simple commands or point-and-click action. This ensures fast and accurate application recovery in the event of a disaster, and helping IT personnel to maintain user access to application services worldwide.
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