Eternal Systems unveiled a new software product for adding high availability and fault-tolerant capabilities to Linux-based systems requiring “five-nines” (99.999%) or greater service availability, at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco last week. Targeted markets include communications (switches, radio network controllers), defense/aerospace (command & control), transportation, and… industrial control, the company said.

Eternal said its approach is based on a technique called “stateful application failover” which ensures that the system's working data and processing state are preserved when an application switches over to a new machine or node, and which is easier to use than other high availability approaches. The company said its architecture is based on an “automated check-pointing engine” that resides beneath the application and takes periodic snapshots of the application's processing context and critical operating system state (see figure).

Facilities such as execution heartbeats, virtual addressing, alarm processing, event notification, and policy configuration ensure that applications can provide uninterrupted service despite system failures, the company said.

The software, called Eternal Duration, supports MontaVista Software's carrier grade Linux offering on Intel Pentium-based systems, and will be available in July 2003.

 
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