News

Another off-the-shelf HA telecom system

• By John K. Waters
• August 13, 2001

Wind River Systems Inc., has joined a growing list of vendors offering tools and software for high-availability (HA) telecom systems. The Alameda, CA-based embedded software and services provider made available a series of software extensions collectively known as Foundation HA. These extensions are designed to enable rapid development of data- and service-critical embedded systems that must guarantee reliable handling of information and continuous availability. The Foundation HA extensions are built on Wind River's VxWorks AE real-time operating system (RTOS), which was launched last year to support hotswap I/O controllers and spare processors.

HA applications provide specific features essential for systems that must remain up and running without service interruption, even during periods of partial failure in the underlying system. Wind River is targeting Foundation HA to optical switching, voice over IP and other communications infrastructure equipment, financial transaction applications handling large volumes of data, military-aerospace equipment, and industrial measurement and control devices.

The Foundation HA basic package provides a fault-handling framework that includes an alarm management system, object management system and device management system.

The company joins Enea OSE Systems and Motorola Computer Group, which developed an HA library for Linux, in the market. In September, QNX is expected to launch its own offering into this increasingly crowded space.

"Until fairly recently, in-house proprietary designs were the standard approach for building HA applications in many industries," said Jerry Krasner, executive director of CMP´s Electronics Market Forecasters (EMF). "Due to tighter time-to-market limitations and emerging industry standards, a substantial market has opened up for commercial off-the-shelf software that delivers HA features."

The Foundation HA software provides a framework that allows developers to define system recovery policies that reflect their applications' needs and requirements. The package includes a number of software management components, including an alarm management system that provides 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.

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