Communicator e3000 MPE/iX Release 6.5 Express 2 (Software Release C.65.02) (30216-90322)

48 Chapter3

Technical Articles

Announcing MPE/iX High Availability Cluster/iX

By Walter McCullough

Commercial Systems Division

General Information

The manual cluster product will be orderable in November 2000 with ﬁrst customer

shipments scheduled for December 2000. The solution will work for the SureStore E Disk

Array XP family of disk products and will also support other dual-ported arrays currently

supported on HP e3000 platform, such as the 12H and Model-20 disk arrays.

Once Cluster/iX patches and utilities are installed, the system administrator can create a

cluster volume set that can be conﬁgured onto two different computers. When an outage on

the primary system occurs, the system administrator will conﬁrm (manual intervention)

that the primary computer is down and issue commands on the secondary system to take

ownership of the cluster volume set and notify users to relogon to the secondary machine.

The cluster solution addresses machine outages caused by:

• System Aborts

• Adapter card failures

• Catastrophic hardware errors

Who Should Use Cluster/iX

Users who require a non-complex high availability solution that allows users to move

business critical data to a secondary computer within seconds of an outage.

Required Hardware and Software

Required Hardware:

• HP e3000

And one or more of the following:

• SureStore E Disk Array XP Family

• 2H (formally AutoRAID)

• Model-20

Required Software:

• MPE/iX Version 6.5

• Patches MPELX93 and MPELX98, which are included in MPE/iX Release 6.5 Express