CORBA Fault Tolerance Done Transparently

April 29, 2002

Continuous system availability requires fault-tolerant software, not just hardware. That's what Eternal Systems' FT/ORB v2.0 transparent software does to support CORBA-based embedded applications. FT/ORB sits between the CORBA ORB support...

William G. Wong

Continuous system availability requires fault-tolerant software, not just hardware. That's what Eternal Systems' FT/ORB v2.0 transparent software does to support CORBA-based embedded applications.

FT/ORB sits between the CORBA ORB support and the network, so application objects don't even know about its services. It includes an optional thinFT layer on the client, the etGateway, which distributes re-quests to any number of etEngines.

The etEngines handle requests and responses from the application objects that work cooperatively with other etEngines. Only the first response, then, is returned to the originating object.

The thinFT layer handles communication with the etGateways. It senses when one is unavailable and uses another instead. Clients not using thinFT can connect only through a single etGateway.

CORBA has a history of being large and complex. Efforts are under way to limit its functionality, reducing its middleware footprint. FT/ORB supports platforms, adding only 20 kbytes with the thinFT client support. Its management interface operates independently of CORBA configuration tools.

Eternal FT/ORB v2.0 is available now. Licensing is based on system configuration. Pricing is $8000/developer set and $500/node. A one-year maintenance agreement costs $1440.

Eternal Systems Inc., www.eternal-systems.com; (805) 696-9051. William Wong

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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