Foreman®

What is it?
How can this product be used?
Product Description

What is it?

Foreman® is a framework for managing applications. It includes a set of software products that may be used to implement robust, scalable, fault tolerant, high performance, distributed Windows NT/2000 applications. Foreman® is currently software only and has been used to implement applications that run on Windows NT Web server farms. Implementations have now been planned for the Solaris and Linux platforms for CY 2001. Future releases will include hardware based functions.

A product suite for implementing Distributed application management, instrumentation, command and control. This product is currently deployed as the management component for a number of products. A deployed version of the Foreman® console is shown in the picture above. This system manages upwards of 90 separate processors distributed throughout a European wireless carrier's Intranet.

How can this product be used?

The product will be used by OEMs in developing products for server farms.
Foreman™ is a fault-tolerant management product. Customers see and manage a single, unified view of the system even though the applications and systems may bridge multiple platforms.
Provides expert, policy-based management of "headless" server systems.
Manages applications, systems and hardware components equally.
Included in the product are technologies that can be used for implementing high performance, distributed applications on any of the platforms supported.
PALM has invested considerable research and development in creating the Foreman® technologies and frameworks. The product has been extensively used and tested in numerous turnkey systems and product developments for our clients.

What will this product save me? Using Foreman, your software engineering team can save, on the average, up to 10% of flow time out the development cycle. This is typically the amount of time devoted to implementing or retrofitting the software management portion for a medium to large size software product.

What do I get when I purchase the Foreman® product? The product consists of an SDK for integrating management into your applications, a toolkit useful in implementing robust, distributed applications, an Agent for controlling local operation and a console for managing applications, systems and services (see figure).

Product Description

This advanced product permits administrators to manage and control applications distributed across a number of servers in a large server farm. A unified console is available as well as an active management process that runs in each of the servers.

Technology for implementing advanced, robust and distributed queuing, timer management and work queue is included as part of this product. All applications can take advantage of the instrumentation APIs as well as the Command and Control APIs. Using the toolkit shortens the time needed to implement robust, fault tolerant distributed applications. Later versions of this product will include functionality in the server kernel as well as components resident on a PCI/CompactPCI® bus.