About Clustering

Clustering is a feature of the Sophos Email Appliance that allows two or more appliances to be joined in a group. Configuration data and other data is shared.

What Clustering Provides

• Centralized management of the systems in the cluster.
• The ability to use the interface of any appliance in a cluster to search and present a single view of the data collected by the clustered appliances.
• Sharing of configuration among the clustered appliances.

What Clustering Does Not Do

• Clustering does not provide high availability.
• Clustering does not provide load balancing. If you need to load balance your Email Appliances, you will need to use a hardware load balancing solution, or another suitable solution such as round-robin DNS.

When to Use Clustering

Clustering is useful in several scenarios:

• When you need improved performance and scalability that cannot be provided by a single appliance.
• When you have a multi-site installation, and need unified management and reporting.
• When you want redundancy and improved reliability.