A fault-tolerant object service in the OMG's object management architecture

Abstract

The object management architecture (OMA) has been recognized as a de facto standard in the development of object services in a distributed computing environment. In a distributed system, the provision for failure-recovery is always a vital design issue. However, the fault-tolerant service has not been extensively considered in the current OMA framework, despite the fact that an increasing number of useful common services and common facilities have been adopted in OMA. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerance developing environment, called Phoinix, which is compatible to the OMA framework. In Phoinix, object services can be developed with embedded fault-tolerance capability to tolerate both hardware and software failures. The fault-tolerance capability in Phoinix is classified into two levels: restart, and rollback-recovery; where the fault-tolerance capability enhances as the level increases. Currently, Phoinix is ported on Orbix 2.0 and on SunOS 4.2. In this paper, the design and implementation of Phoinix is presented and its performance is evaluated.