CEBIT 2000, HANNOVER, Germany — (PRNewswire) — SGI and SuSE Linux AG today announced the initiation of a joint engineering project to bring IRIS FailSafe, SGI's high-availability clustering software, to the Linux operating system. The two companies announced their plans to develop a version of IRIS FailSafe for high-availability applications in Linux environments.

“High availability is an important piece of the puzzle. Having this technology available for Linux will be very important to companies that use Linux in production environments. I am happy to see SGI and SuSE cooperate to bring a Linux version of IRIS FailSafe to Open Source,” said Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.

IRIS FailSafe running on Linux will enable a user to link two or more servers together so that one transparently picks up the computing load should the other fail. An IRIS FailSafe cluster running on Linux will remove any single point of failure and allow applications to increase availability to the level required for mission-critical data center operations. This failover capability is an important component of the maturation of Linux in an enterprise computing environment.

In addition to the resulting product, the two companies will bring valuable expertise to the Open Source community through their combined experience and talent. SGI has extensive knowledge of high-availability technology and has focused on advancing open source technology for several years. SuSE Linux AG also has long-standing experience and credibility with Linux and the Open Source Software community.

With input and cooperation from the Open Source Software community, SGI and SuSE expect to have software available by the second half of 2000. Since working with the Linux community is key to the project's success, SGI intends to release to open source a version of IRIS FailSafe software for Linux shortly after the project begins. SGI and SuSE will also actively support software developers in integrating and testing their code in this high-availability environment.

About SGI (www.sgi.com)

SGI provides a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing problems. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide.

About SuSE (www.suse.com)

SuSE Linux AG has been providing Linux software solutions to business and personal customers since 1992. SuSE produces the popular SuSE Linux distribution; has offices in Germany, Italy, the U.S., the Czech Republic and the UK; and operates SuSE Linux Labs, a research organization providing Open Source advancement. SuSE Linux AG is an established leader in Linux technical development because of its participation in Linux kernel development and other open source projects, such as XFree86, glibc, KDE, ISDN and USB (Universal Serial Bus), since the early 1990's.

 
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