The focus of this topic is to research and develop a solution that will improve combat system operational availability by enabling the fast failover of software functions in the event of a system casualty. This will be enabled by hosting redundant running copies of software in separate locations of the ship. This would enable an application to quickly failover to another location if the ship sustains battle damage. Our long-term goal will be to deliver a commercial quality single DRM front-end tool that will facilitate tactical placement of redundant software (twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc.) across the ship. This will include both provisioning and removal. The system designers will be able to select the most appropriate redundancy/failover mechanisms for each application (this will vary by the criticality of the application, and how it can be deployed). They will be able to create a set of logical rules that define when failover should occur, which redundant copy will become the new primary, and when/where a new redundant copy should be instantiated. This tool will also provide the operational status across all of the deployed applications. The DRM tool will itself be capable of failing over to redundant copies of itself.
Benefit: The ability to near-instantaneously migrate ship functionality will significantly improve a ship's ability to maintain operational capability. This has direct applications to critical systems within industry as well.
Keywords: Failover, Failover, Redundant, DRM, OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS), virtualization, virtual machines
