Forum Tackles Communications Industry's 'Nines' Requirements on Intel Architecture-Based Equipment - hardware and software manufacturers form a business alliance - Brief Article

ISP Business, August, 2000

A recently formed group of hardware and software manufacturers has begun designing recommendations that will simplify and accelerate the development of network equipment based on Intel Architecture (IA) components to meet the communications industry's service availability requirements of 99.999 percent or higher.

The final recommendations of the high availability on Intel Architecture Forum will be applied to application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers of IA-based systems that in public networks must meet those stringent requirements.

Founding members of the forum include GoAhead Software, Intel Corp., LynuxWorks, Motorola Computer Group, RadiSys, and Ziatech. In addition, Dialogic recently joined the forum.

"The initiative to create recommendations leading to open APIs on IA-based network equipment will in all likelihood grow the market opportunity for providers of hardware, software, and solutions that run on these devices," said Al Gillen, research manager for system software at International Data Corp.

In the telecommunications industry, service availability refers to requirements for maintaining the integrity of customers' network connections and transactions with virtually no interruption, regardless of hardware or software failures within the infrastructure. So stringent are these stipulations that they are frequently expressed in the virtually perfect "nines" notations.

The telecommunications industry traditionally has required such high levels of integrity to meet the demands placed on the public switched network. As a result of the convergence of voice and data onto shared networks and the growing commercial importance of the Internet, providers of these services are finding they must adopt similar service levels to be competitive.

However, existing solutions developed by telecommunications service providers are often proprietary, making their adaptation to the networks of this new class of service provider prohibitively expensive and time consuming.

The forum's goal is to solve the problem by developing recommendations for a set of high-availability capabilities that can be applied to equipment built upon IA components for major voice and data networks. The first step will be to define open-system approaches to using IA components in hardware, operating systems, management middleware, and applications. The primary promise of the new open-interface recommendations will be to reduce the time necessary to get next-generation equipment to market.