The foundation of Rhino is a fault-tolerant core that provides continuous availability, service logic execution and on-line management even during network outages, hardware platform failure, software failure and maintenance operations.

The Rhino fault-tolerant core delivers:

• An N-way active-active, symmetric, software fault tolerance architecture (This may be activated and used on a service by service basis - without any specific resilience coding being required in the service. For services that are configured to use this capability, a "call" or "session" does not fail when a cluster member fails).
• Optimal, scaleable and efficient use of all available hardware as Rhino uses symmetric software fault tolerance (not a redundant, hot-standby approach).
• Single system image management regardless of cluster architecture. This means that each service can be managed as a single, logical entity, regardless of the actual physical distribution used for redundancy and scaling.
• On-line application upgrade and on-line application server upgrade.
• Self monitoring and self healing for a reliable and predictable system.

What does "Carrier Grade" mean?

The term Carrier Grade does not have a universally accepted definition. The requirements for a Carrier Grade system are generally accepted to have come from the Bellcore LATA Switching Systems General Requirements 1x series of documents. OpenCloud is explicit about how the Rhino product complies with the term "Carrier Grade."

The following table details how Rhino meets the Carrier Grade requirements.

Carrier Grade Requirements	Rhino SLEE Features and Performance
Performance	Rhino monitors its own performance and can detect overload situations. Rhino will reject incoming work so it can process in-progress work within acceptable operating parameters and avoid a potential failure due to overload.
Reliability and Availability	Rhino is a clustered set of nodes. A Rhino is capable of surviving multiple simultaneous server node failures and network partitioning. Services are continuously available, even in the case of a cluster node failure. Rhino automatically detects node failures, re-configures itself and fails-over in-progress work to the remaining members of the cluster.
Scalability	Rhino monitors its own behaviour using this information as part of its load sharing and work allocation strategies where work is dynamically allocated to nodes in the cluster. New nodes may be dynamically added to a running Rhino SLEE cluster. Rhino will automatically detect the new node, re-configure itself and transparently bring the new node up-to-date with the rest of the cluster. Each Rhino node scales linearly with respect to the number of CPUs and the speed of the CPUs on the machine it is running on. The support for online upgrade of the Rhino SLEE, dynamic re-configuration of the cluster and the self-monitoring based load sharing strategies means it simple to increase the performance of a running cluster by upgrading the hardware the cluster is running on - whilst the cluster is still active and processing services.
Failure Containment	Rhino detects node failures and automatically re-configures itself. The Rhino SLEE then performs fail-over and reallocation of work as needed.
Built in Redundancy	Each Rhino server node is a peer in that it has the same responsibilities as every other node (no single point of failure and efficient use of processing power). The state of services is replicated to all nodes in Rhino cluster as is the state of Rhino itself. As all members in the cluster are peers, nodes can be dynamically added and removed from the cluster.
Management and Maintainability	The Rhino SLEE is managed as a single system image. This management is achieved by using the Management operations are performed as part of a transaction, so that either all nodes perform the appropriate action, or the management operation 'rolls back'. Management of the system is always available as each node provides a management service that receives management commands from the system administrator.

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