Load balancing, which helps speed up Internet traffic and automatic failure recovery features, is also included in the software. The software will support clusters of eight four-processor servers, scaling to 32 servers, Novell officials claim.
In order to provide scalability from commodity-class servers it is necessary to deploy a large number of nodes and to provide load balancing as well as failover. Automatic or manual failover is supported to cater for unplanned or planned downtime...
For heavyweight business computing jobs such as housing a large company's sales transaction database, Microsoft's preferred philosophy has been to share the load among lower-end servers grouped into a "cluster".
In doing so, an F5 solution can be used for load balancing, inspecting the packets then distributing them across servers in an appropriate manner (the box can even take a feed from the servers, to support its decision making).
The tools could help developers catch errors in code that could lead to security breaches. Among the enhancements that will be part of Service Pack 2 will be an expanded firewall and a pop-up ad blocker within Internet Explorer.
Car companies and drug companies are among the early users of such clusters, he said, noting that Microsoft has a cluster internally that its treasury uses to evaluate the company's vast investment portfolio.