Faulty Logic

Eternal Systems may well earn imortality among vendors if its fault tolerance technology is all it's cracked up to be.

Making networks resistant to software errors and hardware problems is the wireless equivalent of grooving on Kenny G — it's the dirty little secret no vendor likes to talk about. Enter Eternal Systems, which provides a fault-tolerant application infrastructure that allows vendors to build continuously available systems with standardized equipment.

The Eternal FT/ORB platform works at an operating system layer that provides greater than five nines application availability. (No one ever wants to guarantee that last .001%.) The product is based on the open standard known as common object request broker architecture, or CORBA — not to be confused with COBRA, the terrorist group that battled G.I. Joe. CORBA allows designers to build the products by using parallel COTS — or commercial off the shelf — components that can be added until the desired level of application availability is achieved.

“We can guarantee on the base station side that those guys aren't going to lose the call, and we can guarantee their application will run,” said Eternal Systems President Tom Laux. “What we can't guarantee is the physical devices moving through cells.” That's a whole other headache as the industry moves into the next generation of wireless services, but hey, it's a start.