I subscribe to the dictionary.com word of the day RSS feed. Today the word is Quroum.
http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2005/09/15.html
“Quorum comes from the Latin quorum, “of whom,” from qui, “who.” The term arose from the wording of the commission once issued to justices of the peace in England, by which commission it was directed that no business of certain kinds should be done without the presence of one or more specially designated justices.”
Very interesting stuff. How much of a geek am I? I read the word of the day and thought, cool I know this one (thinking of clustering only). Then I read both definitions on the page and thought, hey, you forgot one.
You don’t need to run a cluster in England to understand the importance of the quorum to Micorsoft clustering. Microsoft’s definition of the quorum:
“The quorum resource is a storage-class resource and it is used to store the definitive version of the cluster configuration. To ensure that the cluster always has an up-to-date copy of the latest configuration information, the quorum resource must itself be highly available.”
So, you could go as far as saying that quorum = clustering. What a great word of the day! I wonder when resource will be the word of the day?