Motorola initiates industry-wide project to create open source high availability operating environment based on Service Availability Forum standards

(Business News & Technology News, 1 Mar 2007)

Motorola Inc. is initiating a new open source project to develop a complete high availability operating environment based on Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) standards. The objective of the new "OpenSAF" project is to accelerate broad adoption of an SA Forum compliant operating environment.

The goals of the OpenSAF project are to:
- Create an open source implementation of a high availability operating environment which includes the SA Forum Application Interface Specification (AIS)
- Develop necessary additional complementary services necessary to deploy and manage the software
- Accelerate the development of SA Forum specifications by proposing enhancements implemented in the OpenSAF project
- Establish a broadly adopted high availability operating environment that can be leveraged by computing technology companies, NEPs, and other industries requiring high availability, and ISVs.
- Utilize an open source licensing model not tied to any commercial implementation

With this approach, network equipment providers (NEPs) will be able to leverage the implementation of a deployed high availability software platform with the knowledge that enhancements will be proposed to the SA Forum for inclusion in future open specifications. NEPs also will be able to help service providers lower operating costs by using a common software platform across multiple types of equipment. Common predictive actions and common provisioning and monitoring interfaces will help reduce training and specialization, enabling service providers to use their resources more flexibly, efficiently and productively.

Many NEPs have endorsed the concept of the OpenSAF initiative, including Ericsson, Motorola's Networks and Enterprise business, Nokia, Nortel, OKI, and Siemens Networks.

Several providers of computing and communications technology also have indicated support for the OpenSAF initiative including Interphase, MontaVista Software Inc., and Wind River.

Both Motorola and Ericsson will contribute resources from the beginning of the initiative to enhance the open source product and accelerate the development and deployment of SA Forum specifications based on industry requirements. Motorola initially will contribute its NetPlane Core Service (NCS) software to the OpenSAF project. NCS is a complete operating environment that includes SA Forum services and a complementary set of required services necessary for a deployable implementation.

Håkan Eriksson, CTO, Ericsson, said: "Ericsson is a strong supporter of initiatives such as OpenSAF. By focusing on reference implementations for established standards, we believe that OpenSAF can both accelerate the development and improve the quality of future specifications."

Asif Naseem, President, SA Forum, commented: "The SA Forum's HPI specification is already delivering benefits as a widely adopted industry standard. The OpenSAF project will help repeat that success with the SA Forum AIS specification, extending those benefits to all developers of platforms that require 5NINES availability. Customer adoption of the AIS implementation depends on real world implementations of the standard, and Motorola's implementation contributes to the ongoing success of SA Forum."

Stephen Dow, VP and GM, Embedded Communications Computing, Motorola, said: "Feedback from our NEP customers has prompted us to undertake this initiative as an open source project can leverage development resources throughout the industry. This can lead to more rapid development of a fully featured deployable reference implementation of SA Forum compliant high availability software for a wide range of platforms."

According to Magnus Karlson, chairman of the board, SCOPE Alliance, the OpenSAF project is consistent with the SCOPE Alliance goal of promoting and enabling an ecosystem of both suppliers and consumers of COTS building blocks based on open source and open interface specifications. He added that SCOPE views implementations like OpenSAF as important test beds for standardization enhancements, and mechanisms for accelerating the adoption of new features for COTS building blocks.

Ken Klein, chairman of the board, CEO and president, Wind River, noted: "Collaborative, open source development plays a significant role in Wind River's device software optimization strategy and we welcome the opportunity to actively participate in the OpenSAF initiative. We believe this effort will result in a reliable, feature-rich high-availability framework for our networks customers. We are committed to including support for OpenSAF in Wind River Workbench, our industry-leading comprehensive set of device software development tools, thus providing customers a common development environment across multiple software development projects."

"We will transition our Avantellis series communications servers to utilize OpenSAF. This will make a pre-integrated and validated ATCA based computing platform available to the market shortly after the first release of the open source code," said Jorge Magalhaes, director of marketing, Embedded Communications Computing, Motorola.

Tom Kelly, Chairman and CEO, MontaVista Software, added: "As a long time contributor to the OpenAIS open source work, MontaVista is excited to support the OpenSAF initiative. Combined with ATCA based hardware and a Carrier Grade Linux operating system, OpenSAF provides a key high-availability component to complete a full carrier grade commercial-off-the-shelf solution. MontaVista will include support of OpenSAF in our MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition and our DevRocket development tool suite."

The first release of the open source code base will be made available by end of 2nd quarter on the OpenSAF Web site.

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