Reducing Application Downtime During Failover

• US 20120144235A1
• Filed: 12/07/2010
• Published: 06/07/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 12/07/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: SHANKAR, RAVI A., RANGANATHAN, VIDYA, Bodke, Manohar R., MONINGI, RAVIKIRAN
• Granted Patent: US 9,329,952 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 714/19
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/203 using migration
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2038 with a single idle spare processing component
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2046 where the redundant components share persistent storage G06F11/2043 takes precedence

Abstract

Reducing application downtime during failover including identifying a critical line in the startup of an application, the critical line comprising the point in the startup of the application in which the application begins to use dependent resources; checkpointing the application at the critical line of startup; identifying a failure in the application; and restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line.

Claims

1. A method of reducing application downtime during failover, the method comprising:

identifying a critical line in the startup of an application, the critical line comprising the point in the startup of the application in which the application begins to use dependent resources;

checkpointing the application at the critical line of startup;

identifying a failure in the application; and

restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the application is deployed in a cluster and

checkpointing the application at the critical line of startup further comprises checkpointing the application on a first node;

and

restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line further comprises restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line on a second node.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the application is deployed in a workload partition.

4. The method of claim 3 wherein the critical line is a point in startup of the workload partition.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein identifying a critical line in the startup of an application further comprises identifying the point in the startup of the application in which the application verifies a database.

7. The system of claim 1 wherein the application is deployed in a cluster and

checkpointing the application at the critical line of startup further comprises checkpointing the application on a first node;

and

restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line further comprises restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line on a second node.

8. The system of claim 1 wherein the application is deployed in a workload partition.

9. The system of claim 3 wherein the critical line is a point in startup of the workload partition.

10. The system of claim 1 wherein identifying a critical line in the startup of an application further comprises identifying the point in the startup of the application in which the application verifies a database.

6. A system for reducing application downtime during failover, the apparatus comprising a computer processor, a computer memory operatively coupled to the computer processor, the computer memory having disposed within it computer program instructions capable of:

identifying a critical line in the startup of an application, the critical line comprising the point in the startup of the application in which the application begins to use dependent resources;

checkpointing the application at the critical line of startup;

identifying a failure in the application; and

restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line.

11. A computer program product for reducing application downtime during failover, the computer program product disposed upon a computer readable medium, the computer program product comprising computer program instructions capable, when executed, of causing a computer to carry out the steps of:

identifying a critical line in the startup of an application, the critical line comprising the point in the startup of the application in which the application begins to use dependent resources;

checkpointing the application at the critical line of startup;

identifying a failure in the application; and

restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line.

12. The computer program product of claim 11 wherein the application is deployed in a cluster and

checkpointing the application at the critical line of startup further comprises checkpointing the application on a first node;

and

restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line further comprises restarting the application from the checkpointed application at the critical line on a second node.

13. The computer program product of claim 11 wherein the application is deployed in a workload partition.

14. The computer program product of claim 13 wherein the critical line is a point in startup of the workload partition.

15. The computer program product of claim 11 wherein identifying a critical line in the startup of an application further comprises identifying the point in the startup of the application in which the application verifies a database.\

16. The computer program product of claim 11 wherein the computer readable medium comprises a recordable medium.

17. The computer program product of claim 11 wherein the computer readable medium comprises a signal medium.