Foreword

In March, 2000, those of us on the TruCluster project team were gratified to see our TruCluster Server product receive first place in 3 of 6 categories in D.H. Brown Associates, Inc.'s Competitive Analysis of Cluster Functionality. For Digital Equipment Corporation's engineers in Nashua, New Hampshire; Manalapan, New Jersey; Bellevue, Washington; and Galway, Ireland, taking top score in the categories of Cluster Concurrent Database Access, Cluster High-Availability Administration, and Cluster Single-System Image spelled a satisfying conclusion to more than three years of development. Unique technologies, such as a cluster file system (CFS) that enables a fully shared root file system and single file system namespace, the distributed lock manager (DLM), clusterwide graphic and command-line management interfaces, and the cluster application availability (CAA) failover framework, are integral to the success of the TruCluster technology. The TruCluster Server product has become the preferred high availability solution for industries that need continuous operation or require large numbers of compute cycles, such as biotech, mobile telephony, and information services. (When the human genome was decoded, TruCluster was there!)

Now, a few years and a couple of corporate acquisitions later, the TruCluster engineers are smarter, dressed more sensibly, and devastatingly attractive. Significant portions of the TruClustertechnology have made their way into the Oracle 9i Real Application Cluster (RAC) product. We are now busy sustaining and improving TruCluster technology on HP's Tru64 UNIX/Alpha platform and porting it to the HP-UX/Itanium platform. (Coincidentally, in the same D.H. Brown analysis, HP's cluster product, MC/ServiceGuard, took top spot in two of the remaining three categories. Coupled with the technology's VAXcluster heritage, the new HP-UX cluster product will have strong bloodlines.)

Scott, Jim, Greg, Brad, and Dennis have collectively logged over three hundred thousand hours of cluster time and, although not devastatingly attractive, they are decidedly not unattractive. Each of them has woken up in the middle of the night in recent weeks, reciting the cluster boot messages in exact order in their entirety. Seriously, these individuals have been on the front lines representing TruCluster products to customers for years, relaying ideas, as well as complaints, to engineering. They've assembled the tools and solutions they describe in this book while on active duty helping real customers configure and maintain large cluster configurations. They personify the care, commitment, and expertise that the TruCluster project team has put into the product and are trustworthy guides to the technology.

Dick Buttlar,
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Hewlett-Packard Company, Enterprise Systems Group, Business Critical Systems