NEC Unveils Hardened Linux For Fault-Tolerant Servers

The company also unveiled one of the first servers to offer up to 32 Itanium processors.

The servers were introduced at the Supercomputing Conference, held here this week.

While Linux is considered a high-availability platform in much the same way as Unix, it typically does not run on servers that offer similar high-availability characteristics, said Mike Mitsch, senior marketing director at NEC. Also, there is a definite lack of Linux applications that understand how to do failovers, he said.

NEC's new Linux fault-tolerant servers solve those problems from the hardware perspective by using the same servers that offer fault-tolerance under Windows, including redundant hardware so the failure of a component inside the box will not affect the server's operations, Mitsch said.

On top of that server, NEC has added a modified version of Red Hat 7.1 Linux with kernel 2.4.2, which has been hardened, said Mitsch. That hardening includes added management capabilities and the ability to let two Linux-based systems to see the same instructions at all times. "Therefore, if one CPU fails, the other knows what's going on," he said.

The base code of the hardened Linux has not been changed, so applications run the same as they would on non-hardened Linux, Mitsch said. "We just added extensions related to fault-tolerant hardware and hardened the code," he said.

Mitsch said the company currently has about 100 solution providers in North America, many of which came from the Unix side of the business and have found it difficult to transition to the Windows market. They should find the Linux-based fault-tolerant servers a good way to transition to the Linux space, he said.

The server lists for $27,199, including two 800MHz Pentium 3 processors. They are available through authorized solution providers and can be sourced via Avnet-Hallmark.