Unification of replication and transaction processing in three-tier architectures

In this paper we describe a software infrastructure that unifies replication and transaction processing in three-tier architectures and, thus, provides high availability and fault tolerance for enterprise applications. The infrastructure is based on the Fault Tolerant CORBA and CORBA Object Transaction Service standards, and works with commercial-off-the-shelf application servers and database systems. The infrastructure replicates the application servers to protect the business logic processing. In addition, it replicates the transaction coordinator which renders the two-phase commit protocol non-blocking and, thus, avoids potentially long service disruptions caused by coordinator failure. The infrastructure handles the interactions between the application servers and the database servers through replicated gateways that prevent duplicate requests from reaching the database servers. The infrastructure implements client-side automatic failover mechanisms, which guarantees that clients know the outcome of the requests that they have made. The infrastructure starts the transactions at the application servers, and retries aborted transactions, caused by process or communication failures, automatically on the behalf of the clients.