Wind River and Motorola Deliver Integrated High-Availability Solution for Global Communications Infrastructure, Electronic Service Providers

Business Wire, May 22, 2001

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2001

Collaboration of Embedded Leaders Results in Ultra-Reliable

High-Availability Extensions for VxWorks AE RTOS

(Smart Network Developers Forum) Wind River Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:WIND), a leading provider of software and services for connected smart devices, today introduced a series of software extensions for its VxWorks(R) AE real-time operating system (RTOS), collectively known as Foundation HA, that are tightly integrated with Motorola Inc.'s (NYSE:MOT) CompactPCI(R)-based high availability (HA) hardware platforms for embedded systems that require the utmost levels of uptime. Wind River and Motorola Computer Group (MCG) collaborated to jointly develop the integrated hardware/software solution, which enables HA features essential for service-critical Internet and telecom equipment and data-critical systems that must guarantee reliable handling of information and continuous service availability.

In today's competitive telecommunications industry, the demand for high availability systems is driven by network operators and their customers' expectation that the services they provide are constantly up and running. An important measure of this availability is system uptime, with such systems often requiring an uptime of 99.999 (five nines) percent, including both planned and unplanned outages. To achieve five nines availability amid pressing time-to-market requirements, developers of HA systems are turning to commercial "off-the shelf" solutions that take advantage of industry standards and volume drivers. One such standard is CompactPCI systems, which allow a number of standardized single board computers to communicate over a common backplane while providing a means for redundant hardware resources to accommodate partial system failure.

Wind River's Foundation HA software extensions are tightly integrated with MCG's CPX8216 CompactPCI and PowerPC(TM) MPC750-based system hardware platform. These software extensions enable vendors to create HA applications capable of five nines availability as quickly as possible, thus minimizing loss of service, customers and market share. Building on Wind River's highly reliable VxWorks AE RTOS, the Foundation HA extensions provide specific HA features that allow the system to recover from failures in the underlying environment through fault detection, diagnosis, isolation, recovery and repair. Features provided by Foundation HA to achieve this system behavior include an alarm and fault management system, I/O hot swap and CPU failover capabilities.

"To get to market quickly with an HA solution, developers need a development framework that brings together the selected carrier-grade, standards-based hardware platform with an integrated software solution with the features necessary to develop a five-nines solution," said Charles deTranaltes, senior product manager, Motorola Computer Group telecommunications business unit. "Our strong relationship with Wind River has resulted in a HA solution that helps ensure reliability, availability and serviceability for the global communications industry and their end customers. Later this year, Motorola plans to extend Foundation HA functionality by porting the Motorola's Advanced High Availability software to the VxWorks AE operating system and Foundation HA extensions."

"In the telecommunications sector, vendors can easily calculate how much money they are losing per second when their systems go down," said John Fogelin, vice president of Wind River's Platforms business unit. "By combining efforts with MCG to deliver an integrated HA hardware and software solution, our customers are able to get to market as quickly as possible with five nines HA systems capable of managing partial system failures."

Wind River's Foundation HA extensions are comprised of a number of software management components. These include an object management system (OMS) used to describe a system in a hierarchical fashion as a series of managed objects, an alarm management system that works in conjunction with the OMS to provide fault notification to an alarm framework, and a device management system that allows devices to be added, removed and reconfigured while the system is running. Other key benefits include:

-- I/O Hot Swap -- Allows for the physical removal and replacement of
peripheral I/O while the redundant peripheral I/O cards that are providing
service remain active.

-- CPU Failover -- Enables the most critical piece of computer hardware, the
CPUs managing the bus, to fail partially or entirely without disabling the
system as a whole.

-- Platform Abstraction -- Permits usability of Foundation HA across a variety
of hardware platforms, including different types of chassis and
non-compactPCI-based systems.

Motorola's CPX8000 family of CompactPCI systems is designed for critical telecom infrastructure applications that need to meet 99.999% availability. CPX8000 systems have built-in redundancy for active system components -- including system-slot CPU boards -- that enables active modules to be exchanged for repair or upgrade while the system continues to operate.