 |
As embedded systems have grown to be a critical part of the world’s infrastructure, so has the requirement for their continuous, 24x7 operation. When faults occur in systems, it’s natural to assume that the services they provide will be temporarily unavailable while those faults are detected and corrected; however, this is simply unacceptable for many embedded devices, such as telecommunications equipment, transportation systems, financial services applications, and medical electronics. Unfortunately, providing for continuous or near-continuous operation of embedded devices is one of the most difficult tasks for any embedded developer. These systems typically employ some type of redundancy of hardware and software so that once faults are detected, a “hot standby” can take over and seamlessly continue operation.
Most of the highly reliable products that have been deployed to date have been developed with large engineering teams who have constructed customized high availability solutions. Gradually, however, commercial products delivering various capabilities toward high availability are beginning to emerge. While only a few comprehensive solutions have been attempted, there are products which address a subset of the problem and make an excellent starting point toward a complete high availability implementation.
For support of redundancy with a network, Embedded Solution
Partners offers TeamF1’s link aggregation product,
which allows physical links to be combined to aggregate bandwidth while providing
backup in case of failure of a link.
|
