Picture for a moment modern West Africa. Urban bustle amid dust, smoke and heat. Power outages 5 times a week. Wireless antennas hanging off of run-down office houses and new glass towers. Tropical storms that destroy buildings. Flooding in the wet season, and dust storms in the dry season.

Thousands of computers are still in use here. Computer companies team together on dusty streetcorners; from small ones with badly painted signs, to large companies like IBM. Environmentally controlled server rooms do a daily battle with heat, dust, smoke, and frequent power failures. The stark contrast is amazing and powerful.

This environment was the inspiration for the StrongBox Linux project. Where you can't rely on power, computers degrade quickly, and the heat destroys sensitive electrical equipment mercilessly. How do you run business reliably and efficiently in an environment like this? What do you need to do to make it all work?

The answer is to create a computing system that expects to fail. You expect that your hard drive will get corrupted, so you make a system that's easy to back up. You expect that your disks will fail, so you make sure that you can get to your failed systems. You expect that your servers will be replaced frequently, and so you make it as easy as possible to build them.

Enter StrongBox. The brainchild of Liam Helmer, it's a system designed to take the unpredictability out of your computing environment. Although you may not live in a tropical paradise, your computing environment is not so dissimilar: hardware failures are common, backups tend to be incomplete or unreliable, security threats are omnipresent, and systems are costly and difficult to maintain. How can you build a system that will perform when you need it to without all the extreme hassle of building and maintaining hundreds of servers? How do you get redundancy and recoverability without spending tens of thousands on equipment and software licensing?

StrongBox has answers. StrongBox Linux is built from the ground up around the idea of remote management, simple deployment and reproducibility. If you build it once on StrongBox, you should be able to build it again on another system in minutes. Build once and run anywhere has never been so easy.

Also, StrongBox's use of independent OS partitions allows things rarely achieved in the operating system world: very high portability, reversibility, and an intelligent, fault-tolerant boot process. Also, by allowing different applications to run in separate environments, you gain the ability to have multiple applications, libraries, or complete operating systems running on the same system, in an easily reproducible way. This, and the ability to run legacy applications alongside new applications allows a level of compatibility that has rarely been achieved in a Linux distribution.