Making Applications and Services Highly Available

A server failure in any organization can be extremely costly, whether the server is a file, print, Web, or application server. Measuring the costs of server, application, or service downtime in any organization can be difficult. Potential losses can include:

• Lost sales
• Lost customer goodwill
• Lost employee productivity and confidence
• Increased costs due to makeup time
• Missed contractual obligations or possible legal liabilities
• Perishable products going to waste
• Loss of competitiveness

The costs that your organization can accrue due to the interruption of a mission-critical application or service could be extremely high. If you are not making mission-critical applications and services highly available to your users, you are taking a high-priced risk.

This chapter discusses the details of deployment planning for Windows Clustering. Clustering is a feature of Windows 2000 Advanced Server that provides four main benefits for networks and for system administrators:

• High availability of applications and services.
• Scalability of specific applications and services (when using load balancing).
• Centralized administration.
• Rolling upgrade (the process of upgrading cluster nodes individually while the other nodes continue to provide service).

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