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Availigent Provides Safety Net for Computers Used in China's Oil and Gas Industry

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 February 2006, 09:00 CST

Availigent, a leading provider of transparent and automatic high availability software for Linux platforms, today announced it has provided its Duration(TM) 2.1 software in a far-ranging deployment for PetroChina Company Limited's (NYSE:PTR) Bureau of Geophysics (BGP). Availigent's Duration 2.1, which provides 5Nines availability of mission-critical enterprise applications, will ensure that sophisticated seismic measurements taken by BGP are processed flawlessly throughout PetroChina's exploration territory. Under the multi-year contract, Duration 2.1 will be deployed in more than 5,000 Linux servers.

"The BGP Research and Development Center is able to achieve synchronized checkpoint and restore across a distributed parallel application by utilizing Duration from Availigent," said Mr. Liu Chaoying, president of BGP. "This ensures maximum uptime for our seismic exploration application. Customers of our application require the degree of continuous high availability that can only be achieved by integrating our application with Duration."

The importance of high availability for BGP was emphasized by Dr. Huang Cangdian, director of Lenovo Group's Energy Software Research Laboratory in Beijing.

"There cannot be a more vivid example of mission-critical applications than those used in BGP's seismic explorations," Dr. Huang said. "Downtime caused by computer glitches, bugs or other incidents must be strictly limited and applications restored instantaneously to keep data accurate and instruments operating properly."

How Duration Works

Availigent's Duration achieves 5Nines availability (99.999%), meaning less than five minutes application downtime a year, through its unique, systems-level architecture. Requiring no modifications to the Linux kernel or to applications, Duration offers stateful end-to-end recovery of multi-tier applications, usually within seconds. Unlike other solutions that require applications to re-start after a failure, Duration keeps applications running so users are unaware that a malfunction occurred. Therefore, the enterprise is not compromised by a system failure, workers do not lose productivity and customers of web-based businesses are not disrupted.

"The heart of the system is a checkpoint service that captures the memory image and associated storage of multi-process, multi-threaded applications -- in other words, it tracks a process from top to bottom with enough context to restore at any point," said John Abbott, chief analyst with the 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, in a report. This comment appeared in an independent report titled "Eternal broadens Duration fault-tolerance to the enterprise," which was published on August 9, 2005 (see Editor's Note below).

"Mission-critical is no longer a rarified state," said Availigent CEO Bud Michael. "Because of the pervasiveness of the Internet, users rely on computers to be 'always on,' whether sharing applications throughout the enterprise, providing self-help or selling online. The evolution of affordable, easy-to-use software such as Duration comes at just the right time to make 5Nines availability ubiquitous in the enterprise."

Michael said Availigent boasts a cost advantage over competing high availability solutions on two fronts: initial acquisition and lifetime operation. The per-server cost of Duration 2.1 is considerably less than other software products, and maintenance costs are virtually zero. Duration can be installed without any customization of existing servers or software and without expensive consulting contracts.

About Availigent

Availigent is an enterprise software company dedicated to bringing affordable, easy-to-use High Availability software solutions to the 24 X 7 economy. Installed with no modifications to the Linux kernel or to applications, Availigent's Duration 2.1 ensures that computer applications will experience less than five minutes planned or unplanned downtime a year. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Availigent is privately funded by Diamondhead Ventures and Smart Technology Ventures. For more information consult our web site at www.availigent.com or phone us at 408-570-3500.

Editor's note: The 451 Group's report, "Eternal (Availigent) broadens Duration software fault-tolerance layer to the enterprise," referenced above, is an independently-produced report that was neither sponsored by nor otherwise funded directly by Availigent. The report and its entire contents are the sole property of The 451 Group, copyright 2005, and are reproduced here by permission. The entire contents of this report are available at www.the451group.com.

Duration is a trademark of Availigent, Inc.

Source: Business Wire

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