Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Earlier this week RedHat released a new product, the Redhat High Availability Server. This is an "out of the box" clustering solution that is capable of scaling to many machines for true high availability and is capable of running normal Linux software.

This is a very significant and impressive technological achievement and it will be very important to those who need high availability. The problems with clustering in the past have been due to special configuration and software considerations that had to be taken to run a cluster (for example with PVM or Beowulf, you must run specially optimized software that had been compeltely built from the ground up to use the distributed architecture.) This new product does all of the real work for you and allows you to run any standard Linux software application in the distributed environment and take advantage of the high availability, scalability and performance.

I have not tried it out yet, but it sounds fairly simple to employ. The system requires 2 node managers (hence it truly is high availability) and at least 3 other machines for the cluster. With a total of 5 machines and the new RedHat High Availability Server software you can setup a cluster solution and employ whatever software you want.

This is an enormous achievement for Linux and for RedHat. This is by far the most cost effective, easily manageable and extensible cluster solution available today on the market.

Check the press release for more details.   RedHat High Availability Server: Press Release