The name of the original research project was RAIN, which stands for Reliable Array of Independent Nodes. Rainfinity's technology originated in a research project at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal of the RAIN project was to identify key software building blocks for creating reliable distributed applications using off-the-shelf hardware. The focus of the research was on high-performance, fault-tolerant and portable clustering technology for space-borne computing.
In short, the RAIN project intended to marry distributed computing with networking protocols. During the RAIN project, key components were built to fulfill this vision. A patent was filed and granted for the RAIN technology. It became obvious that RAIN technology was well-suited for Internet applications. Rainfinity was spun off from Caltech in 1998, and the company has exclusive intellectual property rights to the RAIN technology. After the formation of the company, the RAIN technology has been further augmented, and additional patents have been filed.
RAIN is also called channel bonding, redundant array of independent nodes, reliable array of independent nodes, or random array of independent nodes. It is a cluster of nodes linked in a network topology with multiple interfaces and redundant storage. It is an implementation of RAID across nodes instead of across disk arrays. RAIN is used to increase fault tolerance.
