A quick note from the person who wrote the ISIS toolkit
Ken Birman
people have posted to it.
Here's the scoop:
1) comp.sys.isis was a newsgroup active in the period 1988-1993 when I
developed and released a software system for doing reliable multicast, the
Isis Distributed Toolkit. At the time the group was very lively.
2) Isis became a company, and then that company was acquired, grew
successful, but eventually reached its end of life. Isis as a system,
though, lived on in some settings -- Air Traffic control in Europe, the New
York Stock Exchange, and a surprising number of other places. It works and
they didn't find an easy migration path off, in part because the guarantees
of Isis (virtual synchrony) are only available in certain systems. CORBA's
fault tolerance standard is perhaps the mostly widely used option for
migration out of the old Isis system.
3) But there are some modern packages with the same functionality. At
Cornell, the Ensemble system can be downloaded and is free and supported by
a users group. Yair Amir's Spread toolkit is also an option and he has a
company helping people work with it. And virtual synchrony can be found
tucked away inside some products, such as the one's Mark Hayden's company
did (Left Hand Networks). It may even be a part of a Web Services platform
from a very big vendor in that space.... but a hidden, internal part.
If you want to drop me a note, my email is ken @ cs.cornell.edu. But I
can't provide Isis support personally. The system evolved quite a bit after
Stratus acquired the company and I'm no longer such a hacker. My research
group at Cornell, though, is doing a new system (QuickSilver) that could
replace Isis and offer much better scalability. Keep one eye on
www.cs.cornell.edu for news about QuickSilver. We hope to have the system
running by early in 2005 and may aim for a release in the Globus toolkit
later in 2005.