RSF-1 Features
RSF-1, the Resilient Server Facility, makes applications and services highly available by automatically switching between servers should a server or service fail. It provides a multi-directional redundant facility allowing servers to constantly monitor and "shadow" each other.
No Redundant Investment
Rather than keeping a standby option idle as your failover server, RSF-1 allows operational systems to act as standby servers for others and vice-versa, ensuring that your hardware investment is not wasted. In the event of a server failing, its shadow will initialise the failed service(s), thus ensuring continued availability.
Highly Available Services
RSF-1 not only provides a highly available platform but also highly available services, allowing individual applications to be stopped, started and migrated between nodes, without affecting other application execution environments or requiring shadow systems to be rebooted.
Automatic or Manual Switch-Overs
When a server or service fails, RSF-1 detects the breakdown and can either restart all associated services on an available cluster node or signal an operator. RSF-1 also monitors the health of individual services on a node via service agents. Should a failure be detected, it can either restart the service or fail it over to another node in the cluster.
Monitoring and Control
RSF-1 includes both a Java and Windows based system administration modules that allow RSF-1 cluster to be monitored and adminstered in real time. They also show the status of any RSF-1 instances available on the network and provide manual switch-overs functions.
Multi-Protocol Heartbeat
RSF-1 uses disk, TCP/IP and RS232 connections to establish heartbeat mechanisms providing independent monitors; all of which must fail before a machine is deemed to be unavailable. The RS232 component uses a custom protocol and is completely independent from network service daemons.
Secondary IP Addressing
Floating host names and IP addresses are used to alleviate the need for any changes to client configurations after failovers. The node in the cluster that is restarting the services simply assumes the identity of the failed machine.
Load Sharing
RSF-1 treats applications as individual process units and executes them on one of a number of servers, as defined by the RSF-1 configuration.
Typically, each server will be a primary node for a group of services, which will all be initiated on one server at system start-up. Once running, the RSF-1 administrator can switch individual services to other nodes in the cluster. This can be used for server optimisation, load balancing, or to grant more resources to certain applications. For example, a Payroll application may require more system resources on certain days. Using this feature of RSF-1, the administrator could move all or some process units to a shadow server to achieve this effect.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Shadowed systems can be geographically disparate, providing high availability across multiple sites and a framework for disaster recovery.
