OES Insider Chat - Novell Cluster Services Oct.27

Interestedin the technical aspects of OES's Novell Cluster Services & looking to get questions asked? Attend the Upcoming OES Chat - Thursday, October 27 at 1 pm Eastern with Novell Distinguished Engineer Robert Wipfel. goto http://www.novell.com/oes/chat at start time in your time zone. (link will be functional starting Thursday morning).
"Engineering for your future
For me, the best part about working on NCS is knowing that we're engineering a truly enterprise-class cluster system that many customers depend on for services that are critical to their business. Not only do clusters provide high availability and simplified storage management, but clusters also virtualize the access to storage and network presence of hosted services; decoupling services from any particular physical server. We predict this trend will continue, and are very excited to be working on technology that will help customers simplify their deployment of NetWare and Linux in mission critical environments, while also creating the technology foundation for new Novell products in development."
"Features
Novell Cluster Services really is an industry leading product, in particular, I'm really excited about the development team's engineering work in support of the following features:

Pure NetWare, pure Linux or mixed clusters for online rolling conversion. Novell Cluster Services is built from a common code base for NetWare and Linux.
Rolling cluster conversion
If you want to convert your NetWare cluster to Linux, NCS supports a fully online, rolling cluster conversion, including automatic translation of cluster resource scripts (for virtual NCP servers and NSS Pools), that allows cluster resources to failover from NetWare to Linux, or from Linux to NetWare, while the cluster is running in production and supporting client access to NSS files.
Works with or without shared disks
Patented shared disk support includes multi-port SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI and FireWire (e.g. for testing purposes).
Works with NSS on NetWare and Linux
NCS and NSS work together to support shareable for clustering disks and multiple server activation prevention (MSAP) - the industry's most advanced protection against mis-configured LUN masking in SAN storage arrays. Even if you mis configure SAN LUN masking to allow a server access that it shouldn't, OES software will prevent trouble.
Works with other Linux file systems too
If you want to cluster Samba on Ext3, no problem; NCS for Linux supports that too. Further, NCS (in OES sp2) doesn't require NSS modules to be loaded for applications that don't need enterprise workgroup file access semantics.
Works with NCP and CIFS
Whether mapping a drive letter to a NetWare or Linux cluster, using NCP or CIFS protocols, NCS provides (in most cases) transparent drive letter reconnect during failover (even in mixed NetWare / Linux clusters).
eDirectory enabled administration
We worked really hard to ensure the Linux cluster administration experience matched NetWare - iManager supports enterprise wide management for all of your clusters, and the (shell) command line interface is also an identical experience.
Scales to 32 nodes, hundreds of terabytes of storage
Novell's cluster, NSS and protocol server teams have worked together to ensure that OES Linux provides the same file system and protocol serving scalability and robustness as NetWare, for enterprise file and print services that customers know only Novell can provide.
Cluster-aware backup
Novell and its partners have pioneering the integration of clustering and backup services. Novell's backup solutions have adapted to the service oriented nature of cluster resources, allowing for backup of data no matter what server is hosting the virtualized file services, and even supports recovery should the cluster resource failover during a backup job. Another industry first notched up by NCS.
Cluster aware disk mirroring
Novell's management of host-based disk mirroring, whether for NetWare or Linux, uses disk-based checkpoints to record mirror status, and provides synchronized remirroring when disks are shared in a cluster. Cluster aware disk mirroring is a great feature for customers that want to replicate data to a remote location.
Simple and easy to setup and operate
Despite its advanced features, the engineering team takes great pride in engineering NCS to be simple to install, upgrade, setup and operate. We hope you think it's rocket science, but prefer to be excited when you forget it's even running."




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