The Appistry™ Enterprise Application Fabric is a software-based execution environment for service-oriented and transactional applications which provides application level fault tolerance (ensuring application reliability in spite of hardware, network or software failures), virtualizes the application layer/space and is scalable on-the-fly to hundreds of processors. Appistry™ Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) is an application environment that frees developers, architects, administrators and executives from the constraints of traditional infrastructure-centric IT. Offering benefits often associated with disparate technologies such as grid computing, application servers and virtualization in one complete solution, Appistry EAF enables customers to achieve dramatic reductions in the cost, time-to-market and complexity associated with developing, deploying and maintaining service-oriented and transactional applications. Appistry EAF builds fault-tolerance into applications themselves, spreading responsibility for application tasks across a self-organizing and self-healing network of machines.-Fabric applications are insulated from physical infrastructure failures -- single points of failure, and planned and unplanned downtime, are eliminated. Appistry EAF delivers mainframe-level dependability in an application execution environment that greatly simplifies development, deployment and management. EAF allows users to reduce infrastructure costs because fabric applications transcend the infrastructure on which they run, the type of hardware supporting the applications becomes irrelevant.-Characteristics like manageability, reliability, availability and scalability are inherited from the fabric, and become qualities of the application itself.-IT organizations can run fabric applications on any combination of commodity-class, standards-based machines to high-end SMP servers. EAF enables effortless scale by performing all steps necessary to assimilate new machines into the production environment.-The correct versions of the operating system, fabric software and all fabric-enabled applications are automatically deployed to "bare-metal" machines making it possible to scale applications by simply adding new computers to the fabric.