What benefit does clustering provide regarding system workload?

Clustering is a technique used in systems architecture to enhance performance and reliability by allowing multiple servers to work together as a single unit. The primary benefit of clustering in relation to system workload is its ability to guarantee high availability and distribute workload effectively among different nodes.

In a clustered environment, if one node goes down or becomes unreachable, other nodes can automatically take over its workload, ensuring that the system remains operational without downtime. This redundancy is crucial for maintaining high availability. Additionally, workload distribution allows for scalable system performance, as incoming requests can be balanced across multiple nodes. This reduces the likelihood of any single node being overwhelmed, which can lead to performance degradation or outages.

The other options do not accurately reflect the key benefits of clustering. For instance, enforcing strict transactional behavior pertains more to how data transactions are managed rather than workload distribution. Similarly, ensuring that all messages are processed sequentially contradicts the purpose of clustering, which is to allow parallel processing and improve efficiency. Clustering also does not inherently enable unlimited data storage; instead, it optimizes the use of existing resources across the nodes in the cluster.