Sunnyvale, CA — (press release excerpt) — MontaVista Software Inc. today announced that MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 2.1 is available immediately to customers. This is the industry's first commercial, carrier-grade quality Linux distribution. Carrier Grade Edition is targeted for edge and core telecommunications solutions, including applications for the converging IP and voice networks, optical… networks, signaling gateways and Voice over IP (VoIP) gateways.

MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) enhances standard Linux with key features for deployment in carrier-grade environments. It is designed specifically for network equipment providers as a standard, modular, communications platform. Based on open source projects initiated by MontaVista Software and other open source contributions, Carrier Grade Edition provides essential high availability features, including CompactPCI hot swap drivers, redundant Ethernet and RAID1. Carrier Grade Edition also delivers a hardened driver architecture, resource monitoring and fault management services, and other carrier grade capabilities.

Carrier Grade Edition provides a robust software platform to meet demands from carriers and service providers for service availability. With its high performance, real-time Linux kernel and high availability features, CGE offers significant advantages beyond standard or 'enterprise' Linux. CGE is based on an open architecture, incorporating standard interfaces for flexibility, portability and longevity. Moreover, Carrier Grade Edition offers developers a choice of vendors at various levels of integration – a choice currently denied by providers of closed and proprietary systems.

Carrier Grade Edition supports industry-leading PICMG 2.16 compliant CompactPCI platforms and standard rack mount systems based on the Intel IA-32 architecture. These include systems from IBM, Intel, Motorola, Radisys and Force Computers.

Key high availability attributes of the Carrier Grade Edition include:

• Fault management framework
• Diagnostics: On-line and off-line
• Performance: Support for sub-millisecond real-time response
• Scalability: From embedded single board computers to large SMP servers
• Openness: built on systems and standard APIs

MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition builds on the company's expertise in embedded Linux and high availability. The new product incorporates all the features of the company's flagship product, MontaVista Linux Professional Edition, including rich hardware support, a fully preemptible kernel and real-time scheduling, small footprint and journaling file systems. It also builds on technologies from the MontaVista High Availability Framework, such as PICMG 2.12 hot swap capabilities (hot replace and hot insert), redundant Ethernet, multi-hosted RAID, and resource monitoring and event management subsystems. Key new features for Carrier Grade Edition include driver hardening, high resolution timers, improved diagnostic capabilities (kernel dynamic probes, multithreaded core dumps, kernel crash dump and analysis tools), POSIX event logs, enhanced kernel panic handler and enhanced fault management framework for applications and middleware.

MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 2.1 is available immediately. Subscribers to the MontaVista High Availability Framework product will be able to migrate seamlessly and without additional cost to Carrier Grade Edition. Subscribers to MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition will be able to upgrade to a next-generation version of the product when industry carrier-grade Linux specifications gain further definition. Support for additional CPU architecture platforms is also planned.

Additional product information is available here.

 
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