Hello,
The biggest differences between and Infoblox Grid and a high availability cluster is in how they work.
- A Grid layout is a distributed architecture that provides improved scalability and reliability. It backs up all the data from all the members into the Grid Master so that if the Grid member would be destroyed, you could plug in a fresh box, and it would automatically transfer the information and continue working. A Grid setup allows you to replace a box easily. For example, if you need to swap between hardware to a virtual appliance, then simply connecting the virtual appliance will get the machine with all configurations and data. This is also great if you are moving from one site to another and if you need to add more boxes to a site. The Grid architecture allows you to scale up and down easily. Additionally, it gives your organization an increase in the number of devices and services supported, as well as the number of IP addresses that are managed from a single view.
- A HA or High Availability, a group of two or more hosts connected is, as the name suggests, keeps the system available and provides an available, redundant, uninterrupted service. If for any reason one appliance would go down or stop responding, the second box will start without interrupting the services of your customers. If you’re an organization that can handle a little downtime at a site, then HA isn’t as important as you could simply plug in a new appliance at a later time for the appliance to work. Typically, larger organizations have a 99.99% uptime or higher requirement and HA at locations such as the 4 9’s is a hard requirement.
Both are valuable and depending on your organization’s needs one or both may be a hard requirement for your organization. HA for being up and always running and Grid architecture for scaling up and replacing old and outdated hardware.
I would like to note that there is a immense advantage to having both Grid and HA. If you have both then you can replace one of the HA boxes with zero downtime and once the new hardware is in place, swap back over to the new appliance in HA and replace the other hardware box. Here, you can update the underline hardware quickly with noa downtime and with a lot less work on the IT team.
The result is that your IT team and CTO can sleep easy at night knowing that if anything would break or a disaster would occur or a refresh would be needed for all your hardware, your organization could continue to operate and run.
Thank you,
Kevin Zettel
