MontaVista says its Carrier Grade Linux distribution is the first to be registered with the Service Availability Forum's Application Interface Specification. Additionally, MontaVista's Linux Carrier Grade Edition was the first to achieve registration with the OSDL's Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) specification, in January of 2003, according to the company.

Application Interface Specification (AIS)

The Service Avalability Forum (SA Forum) was founded in December of 2001 by 20 companies interested in achieving high availability in systems based on commodity PC hardware. It currently publishes specifications for:

• Hardware Platform Interface
• Application Interface
• Systems Management

Like other SA Forum specifications, the Application Interface Specification aims to enable systems to achieve “five nines” of uptime, or 99.999 percent uptime, or no more than about five minutes of downtime per year. The specification defines six APIs (application programming interfaces) that standardize the interface between SA Forum compliant middleware and service applications.

MontaVista began implementing AIS in January of 2002, and released a partial implementation under a modified BSD license in June, 2004. Five months later, the OpenAIS project was adopted by the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs).

The OSDL maintains the Carrier Grade Linux requirements specification, and has called for support of the AIS APIs since the October, 2003 release of version 2.0 of the CGL specification.

MontaVista's Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) is the first product of any kind to be registered with the SA Forum's AIS specification. However, others have registered products for the Hardware Interface specification, including Intel, GoAhead, UXComm, and Augmentix Corporation.

Carrier Grade Linux

MontaVista also says it was the first vendor to market a carrier-grade Linux product, and that three generations of CGE have been used by leading telecom equipment providers, including Iskratel and NEC. It launched CGE in April of 2002, followed three months later with the launch of CGE 2.1. The company launched its first version of CGE to comply with the OSDL's CGL specification in January, 2003.

The current 3.1 version of CGE was launched in October of 2003. It is registered as complying with a range of CGL 1.x and 2.x requirements specifications.

TimeSys was the first Linux vendor to register compliance with the CGL 2.x specification, in October of 2004. Other vendors with CGL-registered products, as of today, include Novell and FSMLabs. Wind River is also likely to register a Carrier Grade Linux product soon.

NEC's senior GM of mobile network operations, Mr. Takatoshi Numasato, said, “MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition provides a level of reliability unattainable so far with any other OS.”

OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen said, “[MontaVista's] leadership role contributed significantly to CGL's success.”

MontaVista's senior VP of strategic operations, Kelly Herrell, said, “Our deep community participation, active membership in OSDL and SAF, and rapid registration of standards compliance are important keys to maintaining our substantial competitive advantage against the many companies now claiming to have Linux-based products for the carrier market.”

 
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