Using references to Star Trek's Borg, along with comparisons to other clustering approaches, such as Linux Beowulf, Chris O'Leary explained the Hive approach to the development, deployment, and management of transaction-oriented and mission critical applications. Noting our recent presentation on Ray Ozzie's Groove (see below), Mr. O'Leary pointed out that leading edge thinkers were moving peer technologies into the mainstream by eliminating the dependence on network reliability or on the reliability of any one computer. Just as TCP/IP can tolerate network failures, so can the Hive tolerate both network failures as well as computer failures.

While there are other companies that use commodity computers to build low-cost supercomputers, Tsunami Research is the first to apply these ideas to the much bigger market for mission critical computing. Large numbers of dedicated, commodity computers form a mission critical computing environment called a Hive. Unlike fault tolerant computers, which are reliable but hardware-based and thus extremely expensive, a Hive is software-based and can deliver extraordinary levels of reliability at a fraction of the cost.

View Chris O'Leary's Powerpoint Presentation (938K)

Chris O’Leary is Director of Marketing and Evangelism for Tsunami Research. Most recently, he was a Program Technical Manager for Cambridge Technology Partners and was a CRM expert. He also led and managed the development of a financial service Web that was built on top of ATG’s Dynamo and BEA’s WebLogic J2EE application servers. Chris was a key member of the team that designed, developed, and shipped SalesLogix, the leading middle market CRM product. Chris was also part of the team that built and tested MasterCard’s data warehouse, which remains one of the largest data warehouses in the world.

These book door prizes courtesy Addison Wesley