IBM introduced DB2 pureScale to provide scaleout active and active services for IBM DB2 running on AIX on Power Systems servers. It is designed to deliver distributed availability and scalability in a clustered database system. DB2 pureScale allows a single physical DB2 database to be accessed by concurrent instances of DB2 running across several different cluster members.

A DB2 pureScale shared disk cluster is composed of a group of independent servers, or members, that cooperate as a single system. A cluster architecture such as this provides applications access to more computing power when needed, while allowing computing resources to be used for other applications when database resources are not as heavily required. For example, in the event of a sudden increase in network traffic, a DB2 pureScale cluster can distribute the load over many nodes, a feature referred to as transaction level workload balancing. DB2 pureScale features are available to you simply by connecting to a DB2 pureScale system with the DB2 driver. No additional configuration is required.

Connection failover and client load balancing can be used in conjunction with a DB2 pureScale shared disk cluster, but they are not specifically part of DB2 pureScale. See Using Failover for details about how these features work in DataDirect ConnectSeries for ODBC drivers.