The Eternal system: an architecture for enterprise applications

The Eternal system supports networked enterprise applications that must operate continuously 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Based on the CORBA standard, Eternal provides object replication not only for fault tolerance but also for live software upgrades, as well as resource management facilities. Through the use of interceptors, Eternal renders the object replication transparent to the application, as well as to the ORB and to the operating system. Thus, Eternal works with commercial off-the-shelf CORBA ORBs and standard unmodified operating systems. Eternal handles the difficult issues of object replication, fault tolerance, live upgrades and resource management, thereby allowing the application programmers to focus on the applications.