The Common Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification originally did not include any support for fault-tolerance. The Fault-Tolerant CORBA standard was added to address this issue. One drawback of the standard is that it does not cover fault-tolerance in the case of network partitioning faults. However, wide area networks, over which distributed systems are often employed, are especially susceptible to network partitioning. The main contribution of this paper is the design of a fault-tolerance CORBA add-on for partitionable environments. In contrast to other solutions, our modular design separates replication and reconciliation policies from the basic replication mechanisms. This modularity allows the replication and reconciliation strategies to be modified easily.
Stefan Beyer, Francesc D. Muñoz-Escoí