ClusterMaker Overview

ClusterMaker takes the mechanisms that administrators typically have to build on their own and automates them. Imagine that your Linux servers came ready to do IP failover, data replication, IP load balancing, health monitoring, and that you could instantly clone more identical nodes. This is the power ClusterMaker gives you.

Since the beginning of Linux in the data center, the open source community has been producing outstanding cluster tools. However, they were each designed with different goals in mind and can be difficult to integrate and configure.

Customers asked for Linux cluster tools that met the same basic requirements:

• Easy to install and configure
• Fault tolerant (data replication + failover)
• Easy to scale
• Flexible and reliable: based on commonly used open source packages

ClusterMaker delivers a graphical web interface and command line tools that make setting up a scalable high availability cluster simple. In just 40 minutes anyone can install an HA or load balancing Linux cluster.

High availability is our primary function. Immediately after installing ClusterMaker on a given server, you can enable high availability by adding a Backup Master. All data from any directories you specify will update in real time from the Primary Master to the Backup Master. Also, Heartbeat is installed and configured for failover from the Primary to the Backup. In the event of a primary server failure, the cluster will immediately switch to the backup and all other nodes will continue running.

Rapid scalability is our other major benefit and our shared root clusters are designed to seamlessly grow and shrink according to demand. If you have a heavily loaded server and want to scale out into more hardware, it's never been this easy. We do it all in software and no complicated SAN-fu is required.

Imagine no provisioning… Imagine no repetitive software installations… Just PXE boot some extra hardware, ANY hardware, and you're up and running with more nodes!

Your web cluster can now grow in seconds or minutes to meet increasing demand, and it has internal IP load balancing. No need for an external load balancer costing additional thousands of dollars! Likewise, in times of low demand it can easily shrink and conserve significant power and cooling costs. No longer does a cluster need to be statically configured to meet peak demand.

It is even possible to configure Autoscaling, which can use network power management to automatically bring more nodes online when work loads are high and power them off when loads go back down. The thresholds are customizable and all nodes are intelligently added and removed on the fly from IP load balancing. Your customers will experience high levels of service, and you'll experience the lowest possible electric bill.

This alone saves enough energy to eventually pay for the software… Consider that at current electricity prices, each 500 watt server consumes about $1000 per year in electrical and cooling costs when it's on 24 hours a day. If your 5 node web application cluster only needs all of the cluster nodes during a peak period and can leave 3 of them off for the other 18 hrs per day, that's a $2250 annual savings! As data centers are pressed to reduce energy consumption and become as “green” as possible, this is a huge step in the right direction.