3. Practical approaches

Since fault tolerance is often designed on an ad hoc basis, the emergence of good-quality commercial solutions is a recent but significant development which will help to improve application reliability. We start by mentioning cluster architectures, for which computer manufacturers now provide turnkey solutions for high application availability, and give the Sun Cluster product as an example. We then present the work of two standardization consortia: the OMG (Object Management Group ) for distributed object-based applications, and the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force ) for Internet applications.