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Shared‐storage clusters

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Abstract

Clusters represent a collection of interconnected computers that collaborate on executing an application and present themselves as one unified computing resource. They are becoming an important segment in the computer industry. The two main flavors of cluster architectures are shared‐storage and shared‐nothing. This article presents host and I/O implementation details, and performance trade‐offs that need to be enforced due to sharing data in shared‐storage clusters. Sharing data requires the need for global concurrency and coherency protocols to maintain consistency of the database, and enforce data consistency in the local node’s buffers, respectively. Various shared‐storage architectures will be investigated, including the Virtual Shared and Shared‐Intermediate Memory models. This article also presents few selected shared‐storage clusters, including the DEC VAXCluster, IBM parallel Sysplex and Compaq/Tandem ServerNet.

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  1. IBM Corporation, 3039 Cornwallis Road, RTP, NC, 27709, USA

    Mazin Yousif

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Yousif, M. Shared‐storage clusters. Cluster Computing 2, 249–257 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019095112733

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