With the advent of HiveCreator, Tsunami, based in St Louis, Missouri, and which was founded by people with expertise in creating sophisticated financial transaction systems that are highly available, is trying to introduce a new clustering concept it calls a hive.
For you Star Trek fans out there, the hive concept will ring a bell, since it borrows heavily from the Borg, a hive composed of cybernetic-organisms that are assimilated into the hive forcibly in an effort to take over the galaxy.
The idea of hives is that building super-reliable hardware and software components is foolish because no matter how good you make either, they will fail. A hive is comprised of what amounts to an uber-OS layer that rides on top of servers and allocates work to all machines in the cluster.
The interesting bit about a hive – and this is something which all financial systems and fault-tolerant networks have and which most HPC-style Linux clusters do not – is that it has a sense of time. All nodes in the hive, which are called workers, know at all times what transactions are running and, more importantly, they know when they are not running well and can jump in and assume control of transactions that are getting bogged down.
Tsunami says it has also integrated self-healing application and network technologies into the hive software as well as an application abstraction layer to somewhat insulate application developers, who are working in C, C++, or Java applications, from the underlying platforms in the hive. The C/C++ compilers come in Windows and Unix flavors.
With the debut HiveCreator 1.0 version, Tsunami was supporting Windows XP, Windows 2000, and FreeBSD 4.7 and 4.8. With HiveCreator 2.0, support for Linux 2.4 has been added. Thus far, only Red Hat Linux 8.0 is certified, but Tsunami is working on Red Hat Enterprise V3 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.1. The company is also in the middle of certifying Windows 2003, and is pondering the possibilities of supporting HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, but has not made any commitments to let them join the hive. HiveCreator costs $2,000 per processor, with significant volume discounts.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
