Maximize business continuity

You rely on your IT infrastructure to keep services, applications, transactions, and data flowing. However, no infrastructure is 100% reliable—hardware can fail, software can crash, and operators can introduce errors. When this happens, critical applications can become unavailable. Moreover, systems or applications need to be taken offline for maintenance. These scenarios cause downtime that can damage productivity and disrupt your operations. To address these threats, you need a solution that keeps your critical applications running with minimal disruption.

High-availability configurations were deployed in datacenters in the past, typically on large, expensive servers, to run critical core applications. The same is true today, but improved hardware and lowered acquisition costs means that high-availability solutions can be deployed in additional environments or hybrid clouds. Now development and test environments can be highly available, or you can provide capability for more testing scenarios. New technologies, like artificial intelligence and machine learning, can also be made more resilient.

You need to be sure your high-availability infrastructure will be supported over the projected lifetime of your application services. Your systems need to fit within budget and be built from readily available, well-supported hardware and software components. Operations staff should find these systems easy to deploy and be able to build upon their existing skills as much as possible.

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® High Availability Add-On is an intelligent system that can form a consistent high-availability foundation for your enterprise hybrid cloud. It improves business continuity by increasing uptime for critical applications and services. It builds on the security and performance features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the leading enterprise Linux platform, keeping applications running and protecting data in the event of failure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On inherits stability, long-term support, security, and automation from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so you can be confident that you are deploying a well-supported high-availability solution that can be tailored to the needs of your company without adding significant cost or complexity.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On provides health monitoring and application restart, maximizing uptime and keeping critical applications within the desired availability target. You can easily move resources between nodes, making it possible to free up nodes for maintenance without disruption.

In addition to a command-line, a graphical web interface is also available to make it easier to manage your clusters. Status information is available for logging and analysis to maintain cluster performance, and you can quickly check application and server health to determine the state of infrastructure components, on-premise or in a cloud environment.

Regardless of planned or unplanned interruption, the high-availability cluster continues to operate. Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On minimizes operator intervention by automatically restarting applications in the event of a failure. If one application crashes, it is restarted on another node in the cluster. A node can be safely removed from the cluster for maintenance or repair while the resources move to another available node. Nodes can be removed from a cluster, or fenced, to protect storage devices from rogue access.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On also keeps applications running in the event of interruptions to network and storage operation. Network interface controller (NIC) bonding in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and multiple network connections for heartbeat can provide redundancy at the network layer. And support for multipathing and storage area networking (SAN) for clustered storage configurations helps protect against storage failures.

Red Hat’s integrated open source, high-availability offering provides a consistent experience wherever deployed. High-availability clusters based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be deployed anywhere a single instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux can run—in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. High-availability solutions are built on Red Hat technologies, which are tuned and optimized, supporting 16 nodes (32 on x86) for high performance scale-out configurations.

Red Hat works with partners to verify that hardware and software, and mutual support offerings are available. A wide range of hardware is supported, including machines based on Intel and AMD central processing units (CPUs) as well as IBM Power and System 2. Additionally, to complement key workloads like SAP and Microsoft SQL, Red Hat works with partners to certify products and maintain cross compatibility.