SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

High Availability Storage Infrastructure

Your data is the most valuable asset that you have—it is what runs your business. Robust, scalable, and manageable storage is a top priority for your IT department. The high availability of storage, applications and services is a critical requirement for your business to be competitive. But even as data grows, you can lower storage management costs and still benefit from an easy-to-manage, high-availability storage foundation that scales as needed.

In Fortune 1000 companies, storage has been doubling every 10 months. History has shown that data loss or inaccessibility to data for longer than two weeks due to disaster can cause a company to go out of business! The documentation requirements accompanying recent compliance regulations force companies to continually increase their data storage. This growth not only drives demand for capacity, but it also creates a need for storage management that can handle the growing data. Because business continuity relies on uninterrupted access to information and services, the storage management infrastructure must ensure both data integrity and availability.

The High Availability Storage Infrastructure, a featured technology in SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 10, satisfies these needs. It includes high availability service and application clustering, file systems—clustered file systems, network file systems (NAS), volume managers, networked storage systems and drivers (SAN)—and the management of all these components working together.

Unlike proprietary solutions, the High Availability Storage Infrastructure keeps costs low by integrating open source, enterprise-class components. The key components of the High Availability Storage Infrastructure are:

• Heartbeat v2, a high-availability resource manager that supports multinode failover
• Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2), a parallel cluster file system that offers scalability
• Logical Volume Manager 2 (LVM2), a logical volume manager for the Linux kernel, which provides a method of allocating space on mass storagedevices that is more flexible than conventional partitioning schemes
• (or respectively) Enterprise Volume Manager 2 (EVMS2), a cluster-aware volume manager that simplifies operations in a high-availability, scalable environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 integrates these open source storage technologies and enables you to support line of business workloads traditionally reserved for UNIX and mainframe systems. Without this integration, you would have to configure each component separately, and manually prevent conflicting administration operations from affecting shared storage. When delivered as an integrated solution, the High Availability Storage Infrastructure technology automatically shares cluster configuration and coordinates cluster-wide activities to ensure deterministic and predictable administration of storage resources for shared-disk-based clusters.

The multinode failover support in Heartbeat 2, the improved node and journaling recovery in OCFS2, and the snapshots in EVMS2 represent a small sampling of the high-availability features in the storage infrastructure. Other features such as the cluster awareness and ready-to-run support of Oracle RAC enrich the environment, simplifying administrative tasks or eliminating them completely. And iSCSI gives you the flexibility you need for low-cost storage area networks.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2) further improves on the open source integration of this enterprise-class High Availability Storage Infrastructure by adding robustness and manageability to its core components. For example, the HPI STONITH module of Heartbeat 2 (also known as STOMITH) is enabled in SP2, providing an extensible interface for remotely powering down a cluster node. In addition, the OCFS2 "userland" tools have been updated, improving simultaneous write access.

Overall, the High Availability Storage Infrastructure protects your data in a way that lowers costs, simplifies storage management and, most importantly, keeps your enterprise running reliably.