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When the infrastructure that supports your business fails, your business can lose valuable time and money. Most of our solutions are available in a configuration that enables the service(s) to be available all the time. Our Managed Services offering provides guarantees of 99.99% service level uptime.

What is a cluster?

You can think of a cluster as a group of servers that provide a service. The service could be that of a firewall, load balancer, DNS server, email server, or web server. Our clusters can be configured in either an active/active or active/passive configuration.

Advantages of a cluster?

A cluster does introduce some additional complexity, but the benefits far out weigh the additional complexity. When you have a cluster providing the service it means that the individual nodes (i.e. servers) in the cluster can be removed without interruption to the users or applications that depend on the service(s). Being able to remove a node from the cluster means that patching and other maintenance issues can happen in a timely manner. With only a single server providing a service, should a patch be necessary, then an outage of the service would also be required. Usually an outage must be scheduled and often times it can take a while to apply the patch. A cluster configuration can eliminate the need for a service level outage. The individual nodes of the cluster can be patched while the other nodes in the cluster continue to operate and provide the service. A cluster also provides the benefits of spreading the resource requirements out of a group of servers, instead of a single machine.
Our firewall, VPN, Anti-SPAM, and Load Balancer solutions are all available in a cluster configuration.