Any enterprise needs to provide uninterrupted server availability in an organization and probe the exact causes for server downtime.
MSCS ensures that resources and applications existing on a failed server are restarted or available on other nodes in the cluster. The downtime may be momentary but business operations can continue uninterrupted.
Monitoring MSCS helps provide high availability, fail-back, manageability, and scalability for most of the mission-critical applications and resources.
High availability ensures that resources such as IP addresses and disk drives are automatically transferred from a failed node to another online node.
Fail-back ensures that resource availability is automatically re-balanced when a failed server comes back online.
Manageability ensures that you can manually balance the server workloads by moving applications and data between servers on a cluster.
Scalability ensures that additional nodes can be added to the cluster to meet future enterprise needs.
Clustering does not solve downtime problems external to the system, such as security breaches or incorrect system configuration. Clustering must ideally be implemented if server downtime is caused by hardware failures, such as loss of a server or corrupted memory.
In a non-clustered environment, mission-critical system failure can result in loss of revenue, data, and customers.