Many businesses would like to be able to provide 24 x 7 customer access without having to
shut down for maintenance. Most system administrators would prefer a method whereby they can
perform routine maintenance and upgrades without having to wait for late evenings or weekends.
Clustering technology permits these possibilities.
This book is meant for programmers, system administrators, and managers who are interested
in better understanding clustering and applying it to their own situation. Highly available and
manageable solutions using clustering and similar technologies have been around for a while.
However, prior to Microsoft’s Windows NT Cluster Server, organizations that needed clustering
solutions had to implement proprietary solutions that were not widely available and come up with
ways to interface those solutions with the organization’s other data processing functions.