SUN extends cluster technology to SPARCengine CP1500

"Previously, carriers had to employ teams of engineers to develop their HA systems," said Fred Rehhausser, head of the CompactPCI marketing group, Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics. "Using this standards-based product enables carriers to concentrate their resources on developing value-added applications and services." The basic technique used in Sun Cluster software to achieve high availability is "failover." The Sun Cluster software monitors both hardware and application, automating recovery if the hardware or software fails and re-starting applications on the healthy node. Sun Cluster 2.2 software administers these by automatically coordinating all the processes. It is designed to protect the integrity of the data and continuation of the services.

Sun Cluster 2.2 software for CompactPCI tightly integrates Sun's high-performance CompactPCI SPARCengine CP family hardware with the Solaris[tm] Operating Environment. The software components offer telecommunications-specific HA management features, including the ability to restart and reconfigure without taking the system down. This particular implementation of high availability is aimed at applications for call processing data bases, as well as system management, maintenance and configuration.

A typical Sun Cluster configuration for a high availability CompactPCI configuration consists of two shelves, each containing a SPARCengine CP1500 board, and a dual channel SCSI, dual Ethernet board, running the Solaris Operating Environment. Redundant disk subsystems comprising the cluster are connected to both shelves as well as redundant Ethernet connections serving as communication control paths.