Hive Characteristics

A Hive has three characteristics that make it unique...

Self-Healing

One of the core assumptions behind Hive Computing is that failure happens.

As a result, a Hive is designed to be able to survive — and more importantly automatically recover from — the failure of any Worker.

Any Request submitted to a Hive is given to both a primary (A) Worker and a backup (B) Worker. As a result, should the primary Worker fail for any reason, the backup Worker picks up where the primary left off.

More importantly, this capability is an inherent property of a Hive and does not have to be controlled, guided, or even understood by developers or administrators.

Self-Organizing

One thing that drives up the Total Cost Of Ownership of existing solutions like application servers is the work that is required to link together all of the components of the system. This process can take a significant amount of time and require the skills of an experienced administrator.

In contrast, all of the Workers that make up a Hive are able to organize themselves and form the Collective Intelligence of the Hive without the intervention of a programmer or administrator. In addition, as new Workers are brought on line they automatically integrate themselves into the Collective Intelligence of the Hive.

Self-Maintaining

While clusters can nominally grow to hundreds or thousands of nodes, the maintenance burden of maintaining all of those individual computers has tended to limit the size of most clusters. As a result, most companies find that it's easier — and less expensive from a total cost of ownership point of view — to build a cluster using a small number of expensive, server-grade computers.

In order to enable businesses and other organizations to harness the power of commodity computers, a Hive is able to establish and maintain the configuration of all of the Workers in the Hive with a minimal amount of administrator intervention. All the administrator has to do is tell the Hive what to do and the Hive will handle the process of ensuring that the configuration of each Worker — including the operating system, HiveCreator, and application software — is updated.