What is a computing cluster?
A computing or server or else load balancing cluster, is a group of independent servers interconnected by a dedicated network. These servers operate as one system, one machine, from the point of view of the user or customer. Accordingly, when users issue requests to the cluster, the distribution of the processing of that request is transparent to the it. A cluster’s aim is to meet the need for reliability and availability of a system. Especially for file servers, database servers and web hosting.
A server in a cluster is also called a node. Each of them relies on a copy of the operating system and has its own local devices. On the other hand, to meet the common mission of the system, these nodes are grouped into storage, compute, monitoring and front-end nodes.
Why you should set itup?
Organizations commonly set up clusters within their information system. In the web sector in particular, we recommend the acquisition of high availability web hosting based on a cluster in order to guarantee availability and avoid data loss. Organizations set up clusters in their network in order to guarantee:
- High processing power. The servers of the cluster work together to process the same request. Consequently, that will reduce the processing time of the request significantly compared to the time machine take.
- The high availability of hosted applications. If one server in the cluster goes down, another server starts up and takes over. The end user of the application will not notice the upstream server problem. One will therefore satisfy banking and e-commerce applications, etc.
- Scalability. For an application hosted on a cluster that receives more and more requests, the basic configuration of the cluster may not be sufficient to meet the current demand. However, its architecture is easily modifiable and manageable. It is therefore easy to add an additional component to obtain the desired performance.