HP will supply Motorola with a Carrier Grade Linux version of Debian, as part of a long-term deal announced yesterday. HP chose the free, non-commercial Linux distribution over commercial alternatives in order to expedite feature additions, a company spokesperson said.

HP marketing manager Doug Small explains that HP's TEM (telecommunications equipment manufacturer) and NEP (network equipment providers) customers such as Motorola required features not available in currently shipping Linux distributions. HP thus decided to roll its own Carrier Grade Linux based on Debian, in order to have more control over the system and its components than would be possible when working with a commercial provider.

Small explains, “It's not just about compliance with the CGL spec. Our customers have enormous codebases, including programs that have been used for decades. They were written to run on proprietary Unixes. As you get closer to the core of the enterprise, Linux hasn't completely caught up with more traditional Unixes in terms of its feature sets.”

Besides libraries to support ancient Unix applications, HP's contributions to Carrier Grade Linux involved a “gap-filling” strategy, according to Small. “The simplest way to describe the elements we [had to build] is 'hardening' — we had to do crash dumps over the network, support IPv6, meet SAF, the Service Availability Forum standards, and add clustering/HA features.”

HP also performs considerable testing on its Debian-based Linux implementation, Small notes. “In general, most of what we're doing is development and testing. We test the base distribution, add our feature sets, perform unit testing, and then do further testing through alpha releases, beta releases, etc.”

Lintel an emerging telecom standard

According to Small, Linux and Intel hardware are in high demand among HP's TEM and NEP customers. “The overwhelming majority of equipment providers are looking to move to industry standards, which is normally defined as Intel architecture and Linux.”

Expedience was a priority for HP in shipping a Carrier Grade Linux/Intel platform, according to Small, because, “When people are looking for standard products, we found they want to go there quickly.”

HP has offered its Debian-based Carrier Grade Linux since January of this year, notes Small.

Linux is not the only emerging standard among telecom equipment providers. Small acknowledges that there is momentum towards blade systems based on the AdvancedTCA hardware standard. However, he says, ATCA has some requirements — including negative 48-Volt power — that prevent it from working effectively in some call-path applications. “The [industry] is moving toward blades, but more importantly, moving from proprietary systems and OSes to Linux.”

The systems HP will supply to Motorola are based on rack-mounted, enterprise-class hardware modified to meet Carrier Grade Linux specifications for reliability and high availability.

Blades are often used in systems with intensive I/O requirements, with real-time operating systems handling signal processing on multiple blades in a single console managed by a management blade running Linux.

According to Small, the cx2600-based systems HP will deliver to Motorola for use in its CDMA radio area networking equipment (shown at right) are not particularly I/O intensive. “These systems are running software that manages the connection between mobile and land lines, and mobile-to-mobile connections. There's plenty of I/O, but not so I/O intensive as some systems.”

 
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