COVERT: Configurable Virtual Redundancy With Transparent Availability on Commodity Software

Scaling integrated circuit technology into the deep submicron regime is expected to increase both soft and hard error rates significantly. Therefore, providing high availability in the presence of relatively unreliable components is likely to become an increasingly important requirement for a diverse set of systems, including general-purpose commodity systems. Traditionally, high availability systems have used specialized hardware and software that cater to a small subset of the application domain like banking and mission critical applications. For example, the HP NonStop system uses a combination of enhanced commodity hardware and specialized system software to create and manage the synchronization of redundant processes.