Sun Cluster Shines

That planning came in the form of hooks and extensions built into Solaris 8.0, Sun's Unix operating system, in advance of the development of a clustering product. When Sun Cluster arrived, the operating system was ready.

"Sun Cluster uses all the hooks and extensions, some of which run down in the kernel itself," says Jim Sangster, product line manager at Sun.

For example, Global File Service, which is intended to provide continuous data availability and simplified system management, operates between the kernel and the Unix file system, and is

seen by the same mount point throughout the system.

Because of this integration, Cluster 3.0 has the ability to abstract a service from a network interface, meaning that an IP service can reside anywhere in a cluster environment.

"That integration enables the solution to synchronize I/O across multiple kernels," Sangster says. "If you can synchronize the global I/O, then you can expand the capability of the cluster as a whole." Once you do that, he says, you've made the cluster both more capable and more scalable,attributes Sun hopes will boost the fortunes of both its management tools and hardware.