The Linux Foundation Announces High Availability Working Group

New demands on high-availability computing are met with collaborative approach to hosting projects, prioritizing features

SAN FRANCISCO {Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit} April 6, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the formation of the High Availability (HA) Working Group.

The Working Group will bring together projects and stakeholders to collaboratively define the open source HA software stack and prioritize features based on input from developers, vendors, and customers. This work will inform support for today’s most sophisticated enterprises that are deploying Linux for mission-critical workloads.

The projects participating in this forum hosted by The Linux Foundation include corosync, DRBD, GFS2, hawk, Linux-HA, Linux Virtual Server, luci, OCFS2, Open Clustering Framework, and pacemaker. Leading enterprise Linux distributions, as well as Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu, are already incorporating this technology and will contribute to the working group.

Novell’s Lars Marowsky-Bree will speak about HA and Linux at this week’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/hpc. Later this year, the HA Working Group members will be meeting at a mini-summit preceding the The Linux Foundation’s first annual LinuxCon Europe taking place in Prague October 24th-26th: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-europe.

“The Linux Foundation’s HA Working Group will bring together leading projects to collaborate on a common set of components and priorities to support this growing area in the enterprise,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The collaborative development model can accelerate the advancement of key technologies and we expect the HA Working Group will do just that.”

HA refers to the availability of resources in a computer system or network and today is more critical than ever due to internal and external demands on infrastructure and applications. Ranging by industry, analysts have estimated that the cost of computing downtime is well over $1 million an hour. With an explosion of big data and new expectations from business customers and consumers about 24/7 connectivity, HA is taking center stage among the Linux community.

As the requirements on HA computing have increased, Linux has risen in its popularity among companies working on these systems. Achieving HA with cluster computing, cloud computing, and virtualization, among other strategies, can be maximized with Linux. Commodity-based hardware and software components make it easier and more affordable to deliver the high-performance, availability and scalability required of mission-critical Linux systems.

Supporting Quotes
LIN:BIT
“This new Working Group brings together the industry’s leading experts on high availability. Open source and open collaboration deliver excellent value to HA customers,” said Florian Haas, Partner Relationship Manager at LINBIT. “We are a very active player in the HA community, and we expect that the Working Group will become an important driver in this community.”

Novell
“Novell is committed to providing our customers with innovative open source clustering solutions for their mission-critical Linux workloads and we’re proud to co-found The Linux Foundation’s HA Working Group,” said Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of Business and Product Management at Novell. “Collaboration among the open source HA community’s stakeholders will ensure the stability and shorten the development time of the latest advancements in this critical market for Linux.”

Oracle
“For over three decades Oracle software has supported some of the world’s biggest data centers and as a result, Oracle understands the importance of High Availability (HA),” said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle senior vice president Linux and Virtualization Engineering. “The Linux Foundation’s HA Working Group will consolidate Linux operating system efforts through contributions such as Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2) so that we continue to deliver on HA innovation in Linux.”

For more information about the HA Working Group, please visit: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/ha.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.