Interview with OPENSAF President Monica Hatlen of Ericsson

1. What are OpenSAF’s main achievements in the past year?

Release 4 is the biggest milestone in OpenSAF history so far. The OpenSAF software has become much more modular and usable, although there is no change in its functionality from the user point of view. Other major achievements are that GoAhead Software and MontaVista Software have both become members of the Foundation, and we have announced OpenSAF’s first disclosed commercial deployment.

2. What is a recent example of a proven OpenSAF deployment? 

Ericsson has deployed OpenSAF in a multimedia application. There are also other deployments that are not publicly announced yet.

3. What can you tell us about how many OpenSAF users there are and where it is being deployed? What specific users can you name? 

In an open source environment, one does not know exactly who is downloading or using the software. However, GoAhead Software has recently reported the use of its OpenSAF-based commercial distribution by Polaris Wireless, a developer of wireless location solutions. GoAhead announced five other customers whose names it cannot yet reveal, although it did report they include network equipment companies, a major defense systems integrator, and wireless equipment providers for both edge devices and core routers. More names will become public soon. The users cover a wide range of kinds of organizations and types of applications. 

4. What do you see currently as the key advantages of implementing OpenSAF solutions? 

OpenSAF follows the standardized specifications of the SA Forum, so it can work with any hardware and a wide range of software, including any Linux distributions. The modular approach allows scaling from very small to very large applications. Since high-availability (HA) software is seldom a source of product differentiation, but rather a piece of critical plumbing, inventing one’s own HA solution is a poor investment of company resources. Furthermore, OpenSAF has been certified on several platforms and more will follow. 

5. How is OpenSAF related to SA Forum? Why do we need two separate organizations with a major overlap? 

The two separate organizations allow us to separate standardization from implementation, which are really two separate activities. SA Forum is specification-oriented, whereas OpenSAF is an open source implementation of the specifications

6. What are the major benefits of OpenSAF Release 4.1? 

The major benefits are its greater usability, software management supporting rollback, seamless integration with the Java application server, and upgrades in information model management (IMM) services.

7. What’s next? What is OpenSAF working on for the future? 

The key goals are usability, usability, and usability! The software is complex and has many options to promote flexibility. However, such options always tend to make the software difficult to understand and apply. We are focusing now on documentation, user guides, and descriptions of how to get started. So our focus currently is on the usability aspects.

8. Why should developers consider open source in an area that has a small constituency and generally requires a lot of support?  It seems like mission-critical high-availability applications would be the last place where one would want open source. 

During a time of continuing economic problems, organizations don’t want to spend money on non-differentiating features. Open source middleware allows them to minimize their costs and buy only what they need. And users can take advantage of OpenSAF even if they only plan to use a small part of the distribution; they do not have to pay for functionality they won’t use. Furthermore, the open source effort attracts more users and more interest than any specific implementation would be likely to get. This larger community actually has the effect of ‘hardening’ the software even further and enhances the mission-critical nature and robustness of the overall solution. Finally, companies that plan to use OpenSAF in their own platforms often find that a commercial distribution offers them the best of both worlds. They get the community growth and innovation of open source along with the quality, robustness, and rigorous testing associated with commercial software.

Monica Hatlen is the President of OpenSAF and Product Manager for Platform and Component Strategy at Ericsson. You can reach her via Mary Slonske at opensaf@nereus-worldwide.com.