Hillsboro, OR — (press release excerpt) — RadiSys Corp., along with partners MontaVista Software and GoAhead Software, claim they have demonstrated the industry's first high availability system based on a truly open architecture. Called the “Open Availability Architecture,” this latest technology enables carrier-class OEMs to easily define and purchase application-ready computing platforms which meet… the goal of 5-nines and 6-nines of availability (5 minutes of downtime per year, and 31 seconds of downtime per year, respectively) and without resorting to using proprietary hardware or system software components.

With the convergence of voice and data onto next-generation networks and the growing number of commercial Internet users, service providers must provide similar quality of service (QoS) levels as today's Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) service providers in order to be competitive. This level of service implies hardware and/or software failures within a system or repairs/upgrades to the system must not interrupt the availability of service or disrupt customers' network connections and transactions.

RadiSys, MontaVista, and GoAhead integrated a specific system architecture that uses open-architecture technologies, including the hardware platform, the operating system and the management middleware. The companies applied key emerging standards and open architecture technologies to the design and development of a high availability system with completely open, industry-standard components.

These non-proprietary, industry standard components, include CompactPCI-based building blocks; switched fabric interconnects; IPMI-based platform management; Linux Operating System High Availability Extensions; and management middleware.

“Recent developments have led to the emerging of formal and de facto standards which permit the creation, for the first time, of high availability systems with a truly open architecture,” said David McKinley, director of engineering, RadiSys. “These include the PICMG 2.16 specification for routing a switched Ethernet fabric on a CompactPCI backplane; the IPMI platform management specification; and components of the latest version 2.4 Linux kernel releases.”

The demonstration, which took place earlier this month at Supercomm 2001, in Atlanta, combined RadiSys' fault-tolerant CompactPCI Chassis (the CP80-12U with built in redundancy of fans and power supplies); switched Ethernet CompactPCI cards; IPMI platform management; GoAhead's SelfReliant 7000 Series management middleware; and MontaVista's Hard Hat Linux operating system.

 
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