NEC Corp has announced the European release of its first fault-tolerant Linux server, the Express5800/320La, which has been developed in conjunction with fault tolerant server specialist Stratus Technologies Inc.
Tokyo, Japan-based NEC's two-way Intel Corp processor-based dual redundancy server uses the same hardware architecture as Stratus's ftServer and its own Express5800 Windows fault-tolerant servers. The architecture enables all processing and I/O commands to run on redundant components in lockstep with fault-tolerant failover in the case of module failure.
The product's Linux operating system is based on Red Hat Inc's Linux 7.1 but features "significant changes" to the kernel, device drivers, storage management and memory management to enable it to support the fault tolerant features. NEC's UK business development director, Paul Evans, stated that the modifications made to the Linux operating system would be released to the open source community via NEC's involvement in the OSDL Open Source Development Lab.
The development of Linux for the fault-tolerant architecture was begun by Maynard, Massachusetts-based Stratus well over a year ago, but was completed by NEC, according to Evans, in the company's US and Tokyo labs. Recently Stratus stated that it did not believe that Linux was ready for fault-tolerant computing, but Evans said that NEC had released the product in response to customer demand from Unix and Linux users for cheaper fault-tolerant hardware.
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News source: The Reg
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