Inventors:
Bruce J. Walker - Rolling Hills Estates CA
John L. Byrne - Pasadena CA
William W. Chow - Upland CA
John A. Gertwagen - Thousand Oaks CA
Laura L. Ramirez - Los Angeles CA
David B. Zafman - Culver City CA
Assignee:
Compaq Computer Corp. - Houston TX
International Classification:
G06F 1516, H05K 1000, H04B 174, H02H 305
Abstract:
A method and apparatus for transparent failover of a filesystem within a computer cluster is provided. For failover protection, a filesystem is physically connected to an active server node and a standby server node. A cluster file system provides distributed access to the filesystem throughout the computer cluster. The cluster file system monitors the progress of each operation performed on the failover protected filesystem. If the active server node should fail during an operation, all processes performing operations on the failover protected filesystem are caused to sleep. The filesystem is then relocated to the standby server node. The cluster file system then awakens each sleeping process and retries each pending operation.