Consider the following two alternatives: asymmetric clustering
and parallel clustering. With asymmetric clustering, one host runs
the database application with the other host simply monitoring it. If
the server fails, the monitoring host becomes the active server. This is
appropriate for providing redundancy. However, it does not utilize the
potential processing power of both hosts. With parallel clustering, the
database application can run in parallel on both hosts. The difficulty in
implementing parallel clusters is providing some form of distributed
locking mechanism for files on the shared disk.