Wind River announced that its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) operating system, development tools, and build system now supports HP BladeSystem carrier-grade and enterprise server blades. Wind River Linux 3.0 is the first registered CGL 4.0 distribution supported on HP ProLiant server blades for the HP BladeSystem, claims Intel subsidiary Wind River.

Wind River Linux 3.0 arrived a year ago, re-integrating the company's Wind River Platform for Network Equipment (PNE) distribution. PNE was the first Linux distro to achieve CGL 4.0 registration with the release of version 2.0 in February 2008.

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HP BladeSystem c-Class Carrier-Grade Platform

HP BladeSystems, such as the c-Class Carrier-Grade Platform introduced in Dec. 2007 (pictured above), are based on HP Proliant blades powered by multi-core Intel Xeon processors. The Linux-ready carrier-grade BladeSystem added NEBS (network equipment-building system) Level 3 rack certification for reliability in extremes of temperature and humidity, fire, earthquakes, handling, airborne contaminants, and acoustics.

BladeSystems are designed for use by wireless and wired telecom service providers and network equipment suppliers, says HP. They are typically employed on the edge of the network in smaller, media-intensive systems including media servers, service delivery platforms, Internet Multi-Media Systems (IMSs), and IPTV platforms.

The BladeSystem previously supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x and HP's customized version of Debian GNU/Linux with HP Telco Extensions. Now, Wind River Linux is available as well, enabling more networking and telecom vendors to standardize on a single software platform across an entire network, says Wind River. The term carrier-grade refers to 99.999 percent availability in a network element or application, requiring no more than four minutes of downtime per year per element, says Wind River.

The Linux Foundation, which oversees CGL registration, has so far awarded CGL 4.0 registration to only two other Linux distributions: MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 5.1 and Performance Technologies' NexusWare Core 12.0. NexusWare, however, has now been tagged with an asterisk, stating that the distro "does not implement all mandatory requirements."

Stated Paul Anderson, VP, Marketing and Strategy, Linux Products, Wind River, "Bringing Wind River Linux 3.0 to HP BladeSystem server blades gives customers the variety and flexibility they need to build best-in-class products while achieving reliability, cost and performance advantages."

Availability

Wind River Linux 3.0, supporting the HP BladeSystem, is available now. More information may be found at Wind River, here.

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