Collage utility computing relies heavily on auto discovery—a feature where Collage automatically recognizes available hardware on known networks and then pools that hardware together for use by applications and services based on their requirements for compute power. To achieve auto discovery, the Collage Controller acts as a DHCP server and fields DHCP requests from application nodes. In some environments, however, there are policies/procedures that prefer not to permit Collage DHCP. To accommodate these environments, Collage supports manual discovery—a way to manually bring application nodes into the Collage environment. This feature was added some time ago, but we've probably given it too little attention in our documentation to date. However, we've just published an article that goes into some of the ins-and-outs of manual discovery. Click the title link and check it out.

Labels: collage manual discovery

Collage 4.2 now provides several storage options to better fit into your environment. Specifically, Collage 4.2 removes the restriction that Collage software and supporting files all reside on the same file system. Conversely, Collage 4.2 now requires that you separate the Collage database and the Collage system software into separate file systems, which all-in-all, seems like a judicious thing to do anyway. While Collage now requires these two file systems, you can also add as many file systems as you want in order to optimize your application demands, meet growing capacity requirements, or streamline your operations. For more detail, take a look at the new article titled Understanding Storage Management in Collage, and happy partitioning.

Labels: Collage control nodes storage management

Several weeks ago, I posted a workaround to a little problem with editing the /etc/hosts file. I'm happy to report that our new 4.2 release fixes that, so no longer any need for that workaround (which required editing the /cassatt/etc/hosts file). Go ahead and use the /etc/hosts file you know and love and Collage will respect your entries when it comes along and makes its own entries.