Looking For Some General High Availability Info

[Mark Duffy_1]

Hi all,

I???m looking for some general ideas for a solution I need to put in place. We have an internet facing scp/ftp server on our DMZ for external clients. This is currently on a Solaris box. We looking to move the services onto an HP server, probably only an A class as this server will not have large demands made of it. The server has to run 24/7 and as such we???ve had problems getting downtime on the existing server to patch, upgrade etc. What I???m hoping to persuade my bosses is that we look at some high availability options which would allow us to patch, upgrade etc with little or no downtime.

I have very limited knowledge of HA products or potential solutions available to us. Would a purchase of two A classes and ServiceGuard be a good way forward? I have heard from someone that running ServiceGuard within a DMZ is not possible or problematic. Is this true? I can???t find any docs/FAQ???s that say this.

What other options for a resilient 24/7 environment are available to us?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Oleg Khoroshylov]

Mark,

Try to see this link for info about MC/ServiceGuard and HA systems. http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/ha/index.html#ServiceGuard
Generally, release notes contains info about compatibility, known problems and other issues.

Hope it helps somehow,
OK

[Keith Clark]

For an ftp/scp or any type of web service my prefernce would be load-balancing as opposed to a fail-over type cluster. Check out F5 networks BigIP, which might be able to host this type of service without the HP or Sun host. If you require the host end of things, use a load balancer in front. Both options will have the benefit of both servers actively serving clients and transparent "stateful" failover in case of a service outage.

F5, Cisco, Foundry Networks and even HP sell load-balancers. I think HP also resells F5...

[Telia BackOffice]

the first cap. in this manual will tell you all about cluster software.

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/B3936-90024.pdf

You should do other considorations like do you have other installations of cluster solutions like veritas cluster on solaris, why not then install the same on HP. That way the same admins can look at both platforms.

On the other hand you may get something from the trucluster, that in the future will be build into MC/ServiceGuard.

BR,
Jannik