The Linux Failsafe project is a community development effort lead by SuSE and SGI to port SGI's field proven IRIS Failsafe to Linux. Failsafe is now Open Source and thus the perfect foundation for a crossplatform high availability solution. Failsafe provides a full suite of high-availability capabilities. These include full N-node cluster membership and communication services, application monitoring and failover capabilities, with a set of nice GUI tools for administering and monitoring HA clusters. It is the purpose of this talk to discuss the architecture and design of Failsafe. I will also cover issues which came up during the port and give a current status report - anyone sneering at bugs will be told that we are accepting patches. With the help of a crystal orb and the TODO list, I will attempt a guess at the future development.

Lars Marowsky-Brée works for SuSE as a consultant and developer, currently focussing on High Availability topics. He is also active in Open Source projects like the Linux Virtual Server, heartbeat, Linux HA and others. Working with Linux since 1994, he spent 3 years working at a 100% Linux and Cisco based ISP in network operations before signing up with SuSE and finally recovering from network monitoring pages.