St. Louis, MO — Tsunami Research announced it has released version 1.2 of HiveCreator™, a software toolkit which enables organizations to create a new type of mission critical computing environment called a Hive™. A Hive is a highly reliable and extremely affordable transactional resource, made up of large numbers of dedicated, commodity computers which join together to form a Collective Intelligence™, that is designed to host custom, transaction-oriented applications. New in HiveCreator 1.2 is the ability to form a Hive using computers running the Red Hat 8.0 distribution of the popular Linux operating system. “Choices are good,” said Tsunami Research CEO Bob Lozano. “Choices enable buyers to select the tools that best meet their needs. Choices drive down the prices they must pay. Choices put power back in their hands. By not taking sides in the platform wars, and instead focusing on making HiveCreator platform agile, we are providing businesses and other organizations with the widest possible set of choices.” In addition to driving down prices, the platform agile nature of a Hive ensures it is both more stable and more secure. Existing solutions such as operating system based clusters rely on proprietary, modified versions of the operating system kernel. In contrast, a Hive is independent of the underlying operating system. As a result, instead of forcing businesses and other organizations to rely for weeks or months on outdated, and often far less secure, versions of an operating system, a Hive enables them to apply patches and updates as they are released. More importantly, the Assimilation™ capability of a Hive enables it to automatically manage the process of distributing and applying patches and upgrades. In a Hive, the operating system software, HiveCreator software, and application software are automatically installed on new Workers. All the administrator has to do is plug the computer into the network and the Hive will Assimilate that Worker into the Hive. When it comes time to update any of those three software layers, updates are simply submitted to the Hive as a whole. The Hive ensures that the configuration of each Worker is updated and is able to do this while the Hive is still processing transactions. At no point is it necessary to administer an individual machine, bounce the Hive, or take it off line. The result is that — unlike existing solutions such as operating system based clusters — businesses and other organizations can quickly, smoothly, and affordably scale a Hive to meet their changing needs. "For all of their potential, issues like reliability and Total Cost Of Ownership are limiting the kinds of problems that can be solved using large numbers of inexpensive, commodity computers," said Ahmar Abbas, managing director of Grid Technology Partners, a market research and consulting firm. "By making systems both inherently reliable and self-maintaining, Hive Computing enables businesses to use commodity computers to perform a much wider range of operations. In particular, this includes vital functions like transaction processing.” Hive Computing is able to deliver on this promise because it is based on three very different assumptions. First, a Hive assumes the application is all that matters. The self-organizing capabilities of a Hive enable developers to focus on the part of the system that delivers the value: the application. Developers do not have to concern themselves with the vagaries of the physical environment. Second, a Hive, like TCP/IP, recognizes that failure happens. The self-healing capabilities of a Hive rid developers and administrators of the need to fear failure. Instead, they can simply trust the Hive to deal with failures as they arise. Finally, a Hive assumes computers are disposable. The self-managing capabilities of a Hive make it economical for it to be built from inexpensive, PC-grade components. All of this enables a Hive to be as reliable as a fault tolerant computer but deliver 90% reductions in the acquisition cost, and 50% reductions in the development and operational costs, of mission critical solutions. HiveCreator is sold and implemented through a global network of Tsunami Research Business Partners. Early adopters of HiveCreator include companies that develop transaction-oriented applications and require that those applications deliver extremely high levels of reliability, but cannot afford the complexity and expense of existing mission critical computing solutions like mainframes, fault tolerant systems, and application servers. Instead, they require that solutions be both reliable and affordable. This includes financial service and insurance companies; homeland defense, intelligence, and other government agencies; and biotechnology and life sciences companies.