Content area
Full Text
CLUSTERED SOLUTIONS SHOW SERVERS TO BE LUCRATIVE CHOICE FOR VAAS, WHO MAY SELL AND INSTALL HARDWARE AND PROVIDE IMPLEMENTATION, CONFIGURATION AND MAINTENANCE.
SOME CALL IT "RETURN OF THE MAINFRAME." INCREASINGLY, NETWORK MANAGERS ARE TRYING TO CENTRALIZE SERVERS IN SO-CALLED "SERVER farms" or clustered solutions. The idea is to get high availability, better performance and easier management by yoking machines together and treating them as a single resource.
For some, clusters of Intel-based servers will serve as replacements for mainframes. For others, clusters will represent a way to eliminate the headache of managing dozens of far-flung servers.
The clustering concept has been around for years on Unix platforms. But it is just now gaining attention in the Wintel (Windows OS and Intel processor) world, mostly because of Microsoft's Wolfpack clustering initiative for Windows NT due to this summer.
For VARs, the clustering trend creates new ways to make money. "Resellers have a multitude of opportunities," said Jerry Sheridan, director and principal analyst in the client/server computing group at Dataquest Inc., a market research firm in San Jose, Calif.
"There is, first of all, the opportunity to provide consulting and services around clustering, which adds complexity to the client/server paradigm," he said. "Also there will be fresh opportunities to sell additional hardware, as well as to provide installation, implementation, configuration, maintenance-all of the things that resellers do."
It is difficult to quantify the significance of the clustering trend. But Sheridan said Dataquest projects that 50 percent of servers sold this year will contain some aspect of high-availability, compared with about 40 percent last year. By 2000, the figure may be as high as 65 percent, he said.