If you haven’t set up a storage cluster before, it can seem a bit daunting at first. You may not know how to begin or how it works. So let us help; here’s a guide to storage clusters.

Storage clusters are a type of architecture that enables you to store data with redundancy. They enable you to have maximum up time as they seamlessly provide data to applications.  Clusters are groups of servers that provide redundancy should one machine go down or become overloaded with other tasks. Clusters provide transparency, meaning that no matter what data you’re accessing, the machine beneath it doesn’t matter to the application.  If you have a cluster of machines named Fred, Barney, and Wilma, it doesn’t matter what machine you’re accessing via the cluster.  It could be Fred, Barney, or Wilma.  Or, you could be accessing the data on Fred and Barney.  Or Wilma and Barney.  Or any combination of machines. It doesn’t matter.

Within the machines are nodes. These are communication points between the application and the data. Sometimes there’s a node per machine; sometimes there are many nodes in a machine.  The point of the node is to communicate between the application and the data.

How you set up the cluster can be either complex or simple. The simple way is to have software that provides the ability to add and manage nodes, whether they’re onsite or in a cloud.

To learn more about storage clusters, or anything else, please Contact Us. Thanks.