Availability Modeling and Analysis of a Two Node Cluster

Businesses today are becoming increasingly dependent on information technology (IT) to meet business-critical demands. Due to this dependency, the computing solution chosen must prove to be highly available, have scalable performance as well as being easily managed. A low cost approach being taken to accomplish this is to cluster multiple industry standard servers together in such a way as to allow workload sharing and fail-over capabilities. However, in able to validate and compare the different techniques, it is often necessary to build models of the system. This paper describes 1) some system characteristics that benefit from clustering, 2) a two-node MSCS cluster configuration, and 3) an availability model of this system using Markov modeling techniques.