Kaspersky Lab patents method for fail-proof operation of applications on a server cluster
Kaspersky Lab has patented a method for maintaining reliable operation of applications in distributed computing environments. Patent 8639818 issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) describes a method for ensuring the fail-proof operation of an application, copies of which are installed on several servers on the cluster and should work together.
Corporate systems serving a large number of users, such as mail servers and databases, often operate on several servers forming a cluster.The new patent describes a method for maintaining a fail-safe operation of a cluster without using a central node. If one of the servers in a distributed environment fails, others will take over its tasks. Decentralization guarantees that the system will remain operational as long as at least one of the nodes is operational.
An important part of the newly patented technology is a counter which measures time based on an algorithm that is the same for all the servers in the system. Thanks to the counter, the method remains effective even if the clocks on different servers are inaccurate or not synchronized. Once in a certain time period defined by the algorithm, each of the cluster nodes updates its counter’s value, storing the new value in a shared database. The server also checks at this time whether the counters for other nodes have been updated on time. If one of the counters has stopped updating, the relevant node is considered to have failed and its tasks are transferred to the server which was the first to detect the failure.
This technology is currently implemented in a security solution called Kaspersky Security for Microsoft SharePoint Server.
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