GoAhead Software this month plans to release the beta version of its highavailability middleware that’s compliant with the Service Availability Forum’s Hardware Platform Interface. Commercial availability of the company’s SelfReliant middleware is planned for the fourth quarter.
SAF, which was established by GoAhead and Intel Corp., now has a large number of members including Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Nokia, Radisys, Siemens and Sun Microsystems. The group’s goal is to create open standards in an effort to move computing systems to more open, modern building blocks. That also translates into lower costs for equipment providers and giving customers like the telephone and cable companies more flexibility in choosing multiple vendors.
GoAhead is the first software member of the forum to announce support for the application programming interfaces that comprise the Hardware Platform Interface. Compliance with the HPI delivers several business benefits to network equipment providers including:
- Isolates applications from change of the underlying platform (hardware, OS, etc.)
- Improves time to market with pre-integrated off-the-shelf building blocks for hardware, CPU, operating system, middleware, database, and stacks
- Allows vendors to move from proprietary development to a focus on differentiating their applications
- Lowers development costs by providing a selection of vendors with proven products
- Reduces risks associated with proprietary hardware and software development
SelfReliant runs as a middleware layer on top of the operating system to manage redundant components for 99.999 percent availability and reliability. It features 2-3 millisecond failover speeds, checkpointing to preserve application data, and over 38,000 per second distributed message delivery. Real-time capture, storage and replication of system and/or application data assure continuous, uninterrupted service.
The GoAhead SelfReliant software was designed to run primarily on high-availability switching platforms or other devices that sit in the call path — such as media servers, storage solutions, SIP network boxes and the like. Motorola has been using the software in field trials for CDMA and UMTS cellular base station deployments. GoAhead customers Sonim and Togabi are both using the middleware in the push-to-talk space.
The GoAhead software can run on Linux, Solaris, VX, Windows or other platforms.
