Re: Updated General Cluster framework draft document

[Alan Robertson <alanr@unix.sh>]

> Darryl Rodden wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> The HA Forum published an open architecture high availability paper:
> ftp://download.intel.com/platforms/applied/eiacomm/papers/ha_solutions.pdf
> 
> It takes a more systems view and discusses all aspects: hardware, OS,
> middleware, etc.
> 
> I noticed that IBM is not part of that forum, though. :-)

This comes up from time to time.  Usually someone imagines some vast
conspiracy or rivalry.  That's not the case.  For the most part we take
complementary approaches to HA.  They largely concentrate on hardware and
system issues for telephony systems.   We largely concentrate on clustering
issues for enterprise systems.

We'd been doing HA work on Linux for several years on before they formed
their group.  Contributions to their work are limited to paying members,
whereas open community developments (like linux-ha and the framework) are
open to all.  They certainly haven't sent anyone on the linux-ha team an
invitation to join them ;-)  On the other hand, at least a few of their
members have received invitations to participate here.  This isn't to say
that their work is uninteresting, or there is anything wrong with their
approach.

As an aside: The cluster framework is not an IBM effort, and it would be a
mistake to view it that way.  Unlike the intel group, it is open to
*everyone*, and not intended to be dominated by any one company or person.  
When I worked for SuSE, the largest contributors to linux-HA besides myself
weren't SuSE employees, but Conectiva and VA Linux employees - who were
competitors to SuSE on several fronts.

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr@unix.sh

Linux-cluster: generic cluster infrastructure for Linux
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-cluster/