Paradigm Shift Drives Service Availability Solution

By Asif Naseem, Service Availability (SA) Forum President

The transformation of networks via a migration from discrete-services based architectures to converged networks that are IP-based, service-oriented, and transport-agnostic has not been lost on telecom equipment providers. Equipment manufacturers have recently moved from a vertical to a horizontal industry model as they must build gear, and enterprises must develop applications, that achieve high availability and dependability while shortening development cycles and reducing development costs. Service providers, in turn, must deploy new services rapidly and vouch for their availability and integrity to compete for users and satisfy service level agreements.

This changeover is being catalyzed by the emergence of key standards for the functional layers of a highly available system. The standardization of the layers – hardware, operating system, middleware, and application services – allows systems developers to create highly available deployment ready systems using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) building blocks.

High availability is a key requirement of such systems, that is, they must provide uninterrupted service even in the event of hardware or software failure. Historically, Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) have designed and built such systems from the ground up using in-house expertise. Many systems providers have also invested significant time and resources in developing software services, often called high availability middleware, essential to achieving availability levels of five-nines or better –that is, service outages can last no more than five minutes per year. Recently, however, such middleware is becoming available from Independent Software Vendors and open source projects.  They are providing products that package key high availability and management services and can be acquired off-the-shelf to build systems that provide uninterrupted service availability.

A major step in making such products possible has been the adoption of application programming interface specifications (APIs) by the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum). Since its inception in 2001, the SA Forum has focused on producing key specifications to address availability, reliability, and dependability for a broad range of applications. To date, the Forum has released the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) and the Application Interface Specification (AIS). These specifications facilitate standardized interfaces that provide shortened development cycles, reduced costs, increased design flexibility, and risk reduction, and enable technological innovation. As market acceptance of implementations of these specifications increases, the SA Forum is accelerating its effort to educate the communications, computing, and aerospace/military/defense industries on how to develop applications that can achieve high service availability.

The SA Forum has released a new white paper, The Service Availability Solution, to provide an update on its mission and role in the industry. This paper explains the context and need for widespread adoption of a standard Service Availability interface, describes the SA Forum solution, and identifies the benefits of an open, standard interface. The white paper is free to download at www.saforum.org.

Asif Naseem is President of the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) and COO of GoAhead Software. You can reach him via the SA Forum’s press contact, Lori Zielinski of Nereus Worldwide, at lzielinski@nereus-worldwide.com.