Conectiva participates in the High Availability Project

Conectiva is helping in the development of free projects aimed at High Availability, a necessary resource for corporations that depend on computer technology for their business.

The raising of a system's availability seeks the continuing of services, be them network, storage, processing, among others, even when an element of the system fails. Availability is a resource defined by a number, shown in percentage. This number is the reason for the time the resource is available for the total time that it is available. The high availability project attempts to make this number come as close to 100% as possible.

Some companies need their systems available for 24 hours daily, all year round and, this solution can be used to guarantee a minimum stopping time. Usually the high availability is necessary in businesses whose systems cannot suffer interruptions in services, such as banks, hospitals, Internet servers, data bases, file servers, among others.

The proposed solution by Conectiva for High Availability, in two steps, is composed of four basic modules: Node Administration, Disk Replication, Service Monitoring and Robust File System.

Conectiva participates actively in the development of two of these projects, Node Monitoring and Disk Replication. The Node Monitoring is a function pertinent to Heartbeat software and its functioning consists of monitoring the terminals, in case anyone suffers a break-down, services can be passed-on to the next. The Disk Replication consists of making a disk mirror though the net. This service is performed through the DRBD, a kernel module that performs the mirroring in bloc tool level. The other two projects, Service Monitoring and Robust System's File is done though the Mon program, according to rules defined by the systems administrator. He can warn if a system is going through any trouble. As a Robust File System, we offer the ReiserFS, a file system which is quite fast and trustworthy. These elements may be used in group or not, depending on the administrator's needs. In some cases, two or three of these modules need to be accessed in group, on others, only one is necessary.

The objective of Conectiva is to participate in the development of these, and other free software projects, this way applying them world-wide, offering all who need, in this case, high availability in their system, a viable low cost option based on Conectiva Linux operating system.

More info about High Availability can be found at: http://distro.conectiva.com.br/projetos/19/

Conectiva makes available the services of configuration, installation and training at its centers located in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and Curitiba, also through the Conectiva service network, which can be found at:

http://en.conectiva.com/services