News

Start-up Eternal shows way to ORB-oriented fault tolerance

• By Jack Vaughan
• March 26, 2002

Eternal Systems took the stage at last week's Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco as a new player in the advanced middleware market. The company released versions of FT/ORB and NIFTI fault-detector notifier software. The products are positioned as software-based, fault-tolerant solutions for distributed embedded applications that require continuous availability.

FT/ORB 2.0 is available for the Highlander VisiBroker CORBA ORB running on the WindRiver VxWorks operating system, and for the Vertel e*ORB running on Linux. The product is based on technology developed by researchers at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

Eternal's goal has been to simplify the task of bringing fault tolerance to object-brokered distributed computing. "We don't expect the application developer to need to know about fault tolerance," said Tom Laux, president, Eternal Systems. FT/ORB is a multicasting system. In operation, it handles faults and issues notifications of events to system administrators.

The company has worked with the Object Management Group to standardize object-oriented fault tolerance. Eternal's Laux describes the NIFTI detector as "featherweight for embedded environments." He said the California Department of Transportation has used the software as part of a test-bed center for interoperability. It was used there as part of a system that employed 200 video cameras in a Santa Barbara county traffic-monitoring application.