DCIG is pleased to announce the availability of its DCIG 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide that weights, scores and ranks over 60 features on 13 different software solutions from 10 different software providers. This Buyer’s Guide provides the critical information that all size organizations need when selecting high availability (HA) and clustering software for applications running in their physical or virtual environments.
The world of HA has fundamentally changed. Technicians who once had to work for weeks if not months to configure and setup a highly available environment for just one application can now many times deploy a highly available configuration for all applications in an environment in as quickly as a few hours.
Yet this transformation is no accident as data centers in all size organizations are rapidly transforming. Driven by the cost savings and power of virtualization, organizations are virtualizing more and more of their applications–“critical” and “non-critical” alike–and putting them on ever fewer physical machines with the number of companies virtualizing their applications exploding. In an October 2012 report, the analyst firm Gartner said that the total number of virtual OS instances already comprised over 70% of total OS instances with this percentage growing to over 80% by 2016.
This is where today’s high availability and clustering software comes in. This software has been around for decades powering application, OS, and server-based clustering. However this software has evolved to meet today’s new application and business requirements.
High availability and clustering software enables organizations to live in today’s real-time world. It frees them to first cluster and then move an entire application stack to another local or remote location within seconds while incurring little to no downtime throughout the process.
Virtualization is at the center of high availability and clustering software’s ability to expand its presence in the data center. Using virtualization with high availability and clustering software, organizations can create highly redundant operating platforms so that applications may be easily ported across both physical and virtual infrastructures.
More importantly, high availability and clustering software no longer has to be an either/or choice. Using a combination of virtualization, the economical, powerful computing platforms available from many hardware providers today and one of the high availability/clustering software packages examined in this Buyer’s Guide, organizations can survive catastrophic events of varying magnitudes with relative peace of mind knowing that they are non-events from a data and application availability perspective.
It is in this context that DCIG presents its 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide. As prior Buyer’s Guides have done, it puts at the fingertips of organizations a comprehensive list of high availability and clustering software solutions and what features they offer in the form of detailed, standardized data sheets that can assist them in this important buying decision.
The DCIG 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide accomplishes the following objectives:
- Provides a comprehensive listing of high availability and clustering software by vendor and product
- Provides an objective, third party evaluation of high availability and clustering software that evaluates and scores their features from an end user’s perspective.
- Scores and ranks the features of each high availability and clustering software solution based upon the criteria that matter most to end users and then presents these results in an easy to understand tables that displays the products’ scores and rankings so they can quickly ascertain which virtual server backup software solutions are the most appropriate for their needs.
- Provides a standardized data sheet for each of the 13 high availability and clustering software solutions from 10 different software providers so users may do quick comparisons of the features that are supported and not supported on each product.
- Gives any organization a solid foundation for getting competitive bids from different high availability and clustering software providers that are based on “apples-to-apples” comparisons.
The DCIG 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide Top 5 solutions include (in alphabetical order):
- HP ServiceGuard Solutions for HP-UX
- IBM Power HA System Mirror for AIX
- Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1
- Symantec Cluster Server (VCS)
- VMware High Availability 5.x.
Symantec Cluster Server achieved the “Best-in-Class” ranking and earned the top spot in this inaugural DCIG High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide. Making Symantec Cluster Server’s strong showing so impressive was that in a highly competitive space most HA/clustering software packages only focus on a few or even only one operating system. Symantec Cluster Server stands apart with its support for all standard operating systems. Further, it takes this support one step further by allowing failovers to be orchestrated across multiple operating systems.
In doing its research for this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG uncovered some interesting statistics about high availability and clustering software solutions in general:
- 100% of the solutions evaluated support at least 14 nodes in a cluster
- 92% send heartbeats over Ethernet
- 92% operate without a clustered file system
- 84% support DB2 in a cluster, the highest level of support for any application of any kind
- 69% support a clustered file system
- 62% support SAN-based (FC or FCoE) failover
- 62% support NAS-based ((CIFS/NFS) failover
- 54% support SuSe Linux, the highest level of support for any OS of any kind
- 15% support more than 32 nodes in a cluster
The DCIG 2013 High Availability and Clustering Software Buyer’s Guide is immediately available. It may be downloaded for no charge with registration by following this link.