There has been a lot of discussion about the need for a generic high availability framework for Linux. To date the foremost proponent of this has been Stephen Tweedie of Red Hat. The idea is that instead of providing specific applications, kernel modifications and hardware to solve specific problems a more generic API should be defined to enable the components to be integrated together [10]. This work is a long term project.
SGI and SuSE have recently released SGI's FailSafe, ported to Linux. Fail Safe has been released under the GNU Genereal Public Licence and Lesser Public Licence and is available for download18. FailSafe offers a generic API for high availability, though not as extensive as that proposed by Stephen Tweedie et al.