Novell SUSE LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 HEARTBEAT Manual page 11

• Low cost of operation
• Scalability
• Disaster recovery
• Data protection
• Server consolidation
• Storage consolidation
Shared disk fault tolerance can be obtained by implementing RAID on the shared disk
subsystem.
The following scenario illustrates some of the benefits Heartbeat can provide.
Suppose you have configured a three-server cluster, with a Web server installed on
each of the three servers in the cluster. Each of the servers in the cluster hosts two Web
sites. All the data, graphics, and Web page content for each Web site are stored on a
shared disk subsystem connected to each of the servers in the cluster. The following
figure depicts how this setup might look.
Figure 1.1 Three-Server Cluster
During normal cluster operation, each server is in constant communication with the
other servers in the cluster and performs periodic polling of all registered resources to
detect failure.
Overview 3