Interview with SA Forum President, Asif Naseem
By Ernie Bergstrom, Crystal Cube Consulting

Can you give me a high-level overview of the mission and goals of the SA Forum? Why SA Forum?

The Service Availability Forum™ (SA Forum) is a consortium of industry-leading communications and computing companies working together to develop and publish high availability and management software interface specifications. The SA Forum was created to help foster the concept that service availability is a critical requirement in many applications and that the industry as a whole would benefit from a single set of specifications rather than multiple solutions. Service Availability middleware and highly available applications can be written once and more easily ported to multiple platforms. Additionally, the integration of third party and proprietary applications becomes much easier.

The work of the SA Forum centers around the development, promotion and facilitating the adoption of its specifications by the industry. Membership in the forum spans the entire range of the communications and computing industry, including service providers, network equipment manufacturers, Enterprise computing companies, hardware and software vendors and silicon manufacturers. This broad membership provides a comprehensive view of service availability requirements and enables the SA Forum to provide industry leadership. Even though the initial focus of the SA Forum has been the telecommunication industry, we have begun to see significant interest and adoption from other markets such as Aerospace and Defense.

You can find a full list of the membership at www.saforum.org/about/companies/.

Where is the SA Forum seeing traction in the industry?

The Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) specification is already a commercial success. This specification provides a comprehensive mechanism for accessing the capabilities of the hardware, and has been adopted by a broad segment of the industry. This includes hardware platform vendors who implement and provide HPI services, to providers of operating systems, high availability middleware, systems management software, databases, protocol stack providers, etc. HPI also has an open source project – OpenHPI, which has served to be a useful starting point for platform providers that wish to include HPI services in their hardware.

The Application Interface Specification (AIS) has already entered commercial deployment and continues to gain momentum. We have seen deployment by tier 1 and tier 2 telecommunications and networking companies and there is increasing adoption within the military and aerospace industry. These industry players are developing and deploying a variety of highly available applications utilizing AIS services.

In addition, high availability middleware solutions that use the AIS specification, are being brought to the industry in a variety of ways, including internal developments by equipment manufacturers, commercial solutions from companies such as Emerson Network Power, ENEA and GoAhead and open source projects such as OpenClovis, OpenAIS and OpenSAF.

How is the adoption of the SA Forum specification progressing? How can the SA Forum accelerate specification adoption?

The SA Forum specifications are helping to enable a viable and vibrant ecosystem of best of breed software components suppliers. These components are being used in high availability applications, thus reducing the need to develop proprietary software solutions to meet the requirements of these highly demanding environments. The SA Forum specifications are hardware and operating system agnostic, so although much of the adoption to date has been on open specification hardware, Enterprise computing platforms and proprietary systems are also part of the SA Forum ecosystem.

HPI has proven to one of the most cost effective way to implement platform management capabilities, and as a result an impressive number of hardware platform providers are making HPI services available as part of their hardware. Comprehensive implementations of service availability middleware based on the AIS specifications are now available in the market. These include commercial as well as open source implementations. Furthermore, applications that use the underlying AIS middleware services are beginning to be deployed commercially in a variety of markets including telecommunications, aerospace and defense, and manufacturing. We expect this adoption to continue to grow and accelerate in the coming year.
With the increasing adoption of AIS, SA Forum is leveraging this momentum to drive it forward. The SA Forum is focusing on assisting the industry in understanding the specifications by delivering education material on the specifications, and guidance on how to use the specifications to implement high availability applications.

Has SA Forum developed and released a critical mass of specifications to the industry?

The SA Forum has to date released two major sets of interface specifications – HPI and AIS. Both of these specifications have gone through significant review by the SA Forum membership as well as by those that are implementing the specifications. Furthermore, we have collected a wealth of useful feedback from the industry and have incorporated it into our successive releases. We recently released the most comprehensive set of specifications to date - Release 6 - that encompass a large number of critical services required to implement highly available systems and applications. As a major enhancement to our specifications, we have included a software management framework as a part of our recent AIS releases. The accelerating adoption of our specifications indicates that we are duly addressing the requirements of the implementers and users.

What’s next for the SA Forum?

Our mission at the SA Forum is to foster an ecosystem to enable the use of commercial off-the-shelf building blocks in the creation of high service availability network infrastructure products, systems and services. We are working very closely with industry leaders and organizations, such as the SCOPE Alliance, PICMG, CP-TA, and others to address the challenges of true service availability. We will continue to release specifications for new functionality and enhance the current set based on feedback from implementers and users of our specifications. We will also continue to ensure that new specifications are backwards compatible with the previous version.

As we work to promote and facilitate the adoption of SA Forum specs by the industry, we welcome input from all segments of the marketplace involved in providing service availability. We encourage you to visit www.saforum.org for more information on our organization and for ways to join the conversation.