Building Disaster Recovery Serviceguard Solutions Using Continentalclusters for Linux B.01.00.00

1 Introduction
Continentalclusters for Linux provides disaster recovery between multiple Serviceguard clusters. A
single cluster can act as the recovery for a set of primary clusters. It is also possible to have two
clusters act as recovery for each other. This allows increased utilization of hardware resources.
Continentalclusters for Linux eliminates the cluster itself as a single point of failure. There is no
distance limitation as the cluster hearbeats are restricted to single clusters and the data replication
latency can be removed using asynchronous replication.
The Continentalclusters for Linux monitoring mechanism periodically verifies the health of the primary
clusters that are defined in its configuration. When it detects a change, the mechanism can issue
notifications. The notification message and type are configurable. Email, SNMP, OPC and syslogs
are the examples of notifications that are supported in Continentalclusters.
The recovery steps to recover an application in a Continentalclusters is completely automated, but
the recovery process must be initiated manually. This is termed as “Push-Button” recovery. After
the administrator confirms the disaster and runs the recovery command, the recovery process does
not require further manual input.
Figure 1 shows a basic Continentalclusters configuration where Site A cluster is defined as a
primary cluster and Site B cluster is defined as a recovery cluster.
6 Introduction