International Journal of Science, Engineering and TechnologyAuthors: Nimasha Senanayake,, Kavinga Rajapaksha, Ruwanthi Hettiarachchi, Ashan Dias
Abstract: Scientific computing environments, including those supporting genomics, climate modeling, medical imaging, and high-performance simulations, require high availability (HA) to ensure uninterrupted access to data and computational resources. Downtime in these environments can result in lost research time, corrupted datasets, missed publication deadlines, or even compliance violations in regulated biomedical settings. Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) offers a robust framework for orchestrating HA across a wide variety of applications, infrastructures, and platforms. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of VCS architecture, its applicability to scientific workloads, and the technical strategies required to design resilient cluster configurations. Key topics include VCS service groups, agents, fencing mechanisms, and integration with scientific databases and HPC job schedulers. The paper further explores storage and network considerations, monitoring and analytics capabilities, and the importance of proactive failover testing. Case studies from genomics centers, research hospitals, and supercomputing facilities illustrate how VCS has been successfully deployed to mitigate downtime. Finally, the review examines future directions such as container orchestration integration, AI-driven fault prediction, and compliance-aware failover policies. The findings affirm that VCS remains a valuable tool for enhancing the reliability, security, and operational continuity of critical scientific applications.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15848217
