Tempe, AZ — (press release excerpt) — Motorola Computer Group today announced the newest version of its advanced high availability software based on the Linux operating system, designed to help telecommunications original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) quickly bring to market applications that require high availability in a distributed environment. With this offering, Motorola has taken significant steps toward providing the key operating system features required for 6NINES availability, or the equivalent of 30 seconds or less of downtime annually.

Targeted at OEMs developing mission-critical applications such as softswitches, media gateways and SS7 gateways, HA Linux 3.0 provides comprehensive high-availability software for Motorola's Multi-Service Packet Transport Platform (MXP). An embedded applications platform, the MXP platform helps provide the industry's fastest throughput (more than 700Gb/s) with the flexibility and scalability needed to help deliver multiple services that can connect to different networks-IP, Frame Relay and ATM for example. General availability of HA Linux 3.0 is expected in the second quarter of 2002 in concert with the full production release of the MXP platform.

The new HA Linux 3.0 provides telecom OEMs with a solid building block to achieve 6NINES reliability by meeting five basic criteria with strong product features . . .

• Hot Software Upgrade — The software upgrade feature allows customers to upgrade software components on a system that is providing service without affecting service levels. Software components that can be upgraded include firmware, operating system and application components. A state machine approach is used with a rollback function so that recovery can occur from any upgrade failure.

• Distributed Event Management/Event Director — HA Linux 3.0 enables system events to be distributed over a network via a reliable, redundant communication path. Failover policies can be managed in a networked environment. As a result, system designers can now accommodate geographic failures when architecting system designs.

• Remote Monitoring/Configuration — HA Linux 3.0 provides an SNMP interface to all Event Manager and Event Director commands. Administering and monitoring of a system can be performed from a central location to any system on the network. This feature allows active management of a system that may be located in a remote location where service response times to failures may be prohibitive.

• Checkpoint Services — The checkpoint services feature provides a framework for applications to exchange data over a TCP/IP connection. Checkpoint services reduce switchover time, allowing higher re-start models to be employed. Reducing switchover time is a key component to achieving 6NINES service availability levels. Checkpoint services runs on the redundant PICMG 2.16 communication paths in the MXP platform, ensuring that an IP link failure does not disrupt service availability levels.

“Achieving 30 seconds or less downtime a year cannot be achieved by hardware or software alone; the two must be tightly integrated,” said Charles deTranaltes, business manager, Motorola Computer Group's telecommunications business. “The release of the new HA Linux 3.0, coupled with our . . . carrier-grade CompactPCI systems, is an important milestone in our on-going quest to improve uptime and service continuity for customers. In this software release, we have not only made tremendous strides in features and functionality, we have also identified those key areas which must be enhanced in order to officially deliver 6NINES availability in the near term.”

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