Building a dependable system from a legacy application with CORBA

This paper presents a dependability oriented, fault tolerance based system design, development, and deployment approach. The approach relies on an architectural framework, which allows legacy software modules to be reused as the basic building blocks of a distributed dependable application. Different levels of replication and alternative adjudication strategies are implemented behind a unified interface. These can be configured for achieving the optimal compromise between dependability and performance, according to application, deployment environment, and fault characteristics. The suggested solution can be implemented on top of any CORBA infrastructure. The architecture has been developed and tested. Experimental results are presented and discussed. 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.