Irish start-up Antefacto has picked up a part of the appliance server market vacated by Sun Microsystems last year.

After Sun bought appliance server maker Cobalt Networks in the autumn of 2000, the computing giant quietly dropped the StaqWare software that let Internet service providers and businesses build high-availability clusters of Cobalt Raq server appliances. The reason Sun gave to its Cobalt subsidiary at the time was that it did not want to be in the software application business, and StaqWare was a software application.

Now, Antefacto has taken up where Sun left off, launching the S1000 high-availability appliance. With the S1000, Antefacto reckons that companies with mission-critical Web sites will be able to ensure less than five minutes downtime a year--that equates to what is known as five-nines availability, or 99.999 percent availability.

Cobalt quoted four-nines availability for StaqWare, equivalent to about one hour of downtime a year. Both levels were until recently only available in very high-cost systems that only large organizations could afford.

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