Fig 1. Typical management configuration

MySQL Cluster is designed to be a High Availability, Fault Tolerant database where no single failure results in any loss of service.

This is however dependent on how the user chooses to architect the configuration – in terms of which nodes are placed on which physical hosts, and which physical resources each physical host is dependent on (for example if the two blades containing the data nodes making up a particular node group are cooled by the same fan then the failure of that fan could result in the loss of the whole database).

Of course, there’s always the possibility of an entire data center being lost due to earthquake, sabotage etc. and so for a fully available system, you should consider using asynchronous replication to a geographically remote Cluster.

Fig 1. …