Infrastructure - Iris FailSafe picks up a penguin

Linux distributor SuSe and hardware manufacturer Silicon Graphics (SGI) are developing a high availability version of Linux using SGI's clustering software, Iris FailSafe.

Iris FailSafe running on Linux will enable network managers to link two or more servers together so that one transparently picks up the computing load should another fall over. An Iris FailSafe Linux cluster in the back end will remove any single point of failure and allow applications to increase availability to the level required for mission-critical data centre operations.

Welcoming the development work, Linus Torvalds said: "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."

Chris Martin, an analyst at Xephon, said the development of clustering technology would give users more confidence to deploy high-availability e-business systems on Linux. However, he warned that: "There are still question marks around the scalability of Linux and whether it can handle the workloads that the busiest sites generate."

With input from the Open Source Software community, SGI and SuSE expect to have software available by the second half of 2000. SGI intends to release to open source a version of Iris FailSafe software for Linux to encourage development in the Linux community.

In addition, SGI will release the Irix XFS journaling file system to the open source community within two months. The technology allows IT departments to run Linux servers that share disks over a storage area network (San).