Off-the-shelf software provides high availability

Fault-tolerant and highly available systems have uptimes of nearly 100% and 99.999%, respectively, and they often require significant reworking of applications and operating-system drivers to implement various levels of application reliability. Now, Eternal Systems claims to protect applications from failure with as little as one line of code.

The company's Eternal Duration software manages availability and failover of applications using check-pointing. A check-pointing engine links under the application and takes periodic "snapshots" of the application's processing context and operating-system state information. One line of code initiates the check-pointing engine and identifies the critical processing context. If adding more code is feasible, you can add facilities such as heartbeats, virtual addressing, alarm processing, event notification, and policy configuration, all of which can improve failover identification, response, and recovery.

Eternal Duration supports both single-threaded and multithreaded application processes. When it detects a process fault, it attempts to restart the process on the same node or on a designated standby node. If a node fault occurs, all processes running on the node restart on a standby mode. A fault notifier informs clients and system middleware of events and actions they register for. The software is now in beta testing and will become available in July. Prices start at $35,000 for OEM-development licenses.

Eternal Systems, 1-408-369-7400, www.eternal-systems.com.