GoAhead Software Announces SelfReliant 4.0,
Leading High Availability Solution Offers Greater Integration and
Improved Management
Italtel Selects SelfReliant 4.0 for Its Next Generation Softswitch
SUPERCOMM, Chicago June 6, 2005 – GoAhead® Software, the expert in building integrated middleware for highly available systems, today announced the immediate availability of GoAhead SelfReliant® 4.0, its carrier-grade, application ready high availability software platform. The newest release offers pre-integration with popular hardware and software components used in embedded solutions and improved management capabilities. Equipment manufacturers lower their development costs and accelerate their time to market using GoAhead’s standards-based, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) product. Italtel, a leading company in carrier grade products for IP-based Next Generation Networks and Services, selected SelfReliant 4.0 as an integral part of its recent system architecture upgrade.
Italtel, which according to the last survey of Dittberner Associates ranked third worldwide with 11% of the Softswitch market share while leading the EMEA with a share greater than 29%, evaluated GoAhead SelfReliant 3.1.1. and SelfReliant 4.0 for the Next Generation Networks and 3GPP-IMS model, “GoAhead stood out as the leading high availability solution given its 10 year track record and its global experience with top telecom equipment manufacturers,” said Franco Serio, Business Unit Products/co-Head, executive vice president at Italtel. “We selected SelfReliant 4.0 because of its support for multiple hardware and software platforms, as well as its support for SNMP access to critical platform data through the SA Forum’s Hardware Platform Interface (HPI).”
SelfReliant 4.0 provides a solid foundation for the implementation of Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) APIs. GoAhead was the first high availability middleware company to support the SA Forum Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) A & B specifications and GoAhead continues to work with SA Forum to complete support for the newly released Application Interface Specification (AIS) B.01.01, an open standard that allows developers to write application software that is portable across different vendors’ implementations of high availability middleware. The first version of GoAhead‘s AIS compliant suite, which will also support HPI A & B specifications, will be available in summer of 2005.
”Our customers want to do less integration and more innovation,” remarked John Fanelli, vice president of product planning and management, Wind River. “The integration offered by SelfReliant 4.0 on top of platforms like WindRiver’s Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, will radically reduce development time and make it possible for companies to bring innovative products to market faster.”
New Features and Functionality
- Greater Integration
Within SelfReliant 4.0, GoAhead has led the industry to integrate the HA Middleware with hardware and software commonly used to create embedded solutions. This reduces the amount of work on the customer’s part to perform this integration, and makes it much easier for customers to plug and play with a variety of open standards hardware, operating systems and middleware solutions. SelfReliant 4.0 supports a variety of leading Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) platforms including Intel’s NetStructure Chassis, Kontron’s VHDS, Motorola’s EndurX platform, Radisys’s Promentum, HP’s Advanced Open Telecom Platform as well as PICMG 2.16 platforms and PCI platforms such as the Augmentix A+ series. SelfReliant 4.0 will also provide integration with leading in-memory databases such as TimesTen’s Data Server.
- Storage Management Services
The Storage Management Service was built to handle storage subsystems as a managed resource to be easily included in a system’s availability management policies. The service makes it easy to add objects which represent storage devices on your system and to define the redundancy policies to be used for the storage devices. SelfReliant 4.0 supports RAID-1 running on the Linux md (multiple device) driver. This capability makes it easier for customers to monitor storage devices for failures, and to take appropriate action in the event of a failure.
Sophisticated Resource Management
- SelfReliant MIB accessible via SNMP
Telecom equipment manufacturers now can easily provide customers with external system management access, via SNMP, to the state of the system as represented in the
Availability Management Service’s (AMS) System Model. With the addition of this functionality, remote users can view the state of resources, perform administrative operations, configure and receive trap notifications, and publish AMS object subclasses using a standard SNMP MIB browser. The addition of this feature allows telecom equipment manufacturers to focus resources on initiatives that increase their competitive edge.
- Resource Virtual IP
Virtual IP addresses can be dynamically assigned and unassigned to the active resources in a system, making the location of both internally and externally accessible resources transparent to the consumer of the services provided by those resources. This enables developers to significantly simplify their applications, requires less administrative overhead and ensures system scalability. Users are able to add and remove virtual IP addresses from an application on a node in the cluster, failover virtual IP addresses between interfaces on the same node, and failover virtual IP addresses between nodes in the cluster.
- Hot Swap Management
Hardware resource management requirements have become much more sophisticated as equipment manufacturers need to ensure that when hardware resources are inserted or extracted, (i.e. hot swapped) from a running system, the operational requirements of the system are always met. SelfReliant 4.0 provides built-in, extensible hot swap management policies for your system (e.g. ensuring a graceful transition to standby resources when a hardware resource is extracted). Although customers could create this capability in previous versions by programming, the new facilities significantly reduce this effort.
- Alarm Management
Telecom equipment manufacturers no longer have to build their own alarm management engine from scratch. SelfReliant 4.0 provides built-in, extensible alarm management policies for both hardware and software resources that can be configured to match the overall system’s alarm management policies. SelfReliant 4.0 also provides a central repository for all alarms, allows users to create and delete their own alarms, and in general provides a quick way to detect and isolate faults in support of your system’s availability management policies.
- Administrative Node Shutdown
Upgrade management is now made easier and more efficient with administrative node shutdown, which gives users the ability to upgrade without losing system uptime. This feature provides a controlled method of disabling a node and its dependent objects, allowing the resources to gracefully offload any jobs currently being processed before they are disabled. When node shutdown is performed on the cluster and AMS manager node, the result is a controlled management node switchover. Nodes that have been disabled in this manner can be brought back into service by performing a node restoration.
Pricing & Availability
GoAhead SelfReliant 4.0 is immediately available. Pricing remains unchanged from previous releases of SelfReliant. Contact Michael Nitso, Director of Worldwide Sales at (425) 453-1900 for additional product information.
GoAhead Demonstrating at SuperComm
GoAhead will demonstrate SelfReliant 4.0 as well as its pre-release AIS compliant product and at SuperComm, June 6-9, in the Service Availability Forum booth #71022.
About Italtel
Italtel designs, develops and installs new-generation integrated multi-service networks (voice/data/video) ensuring fixed and mobile operators and ISPs reliable and open to networking and technological developments infrastructures, thanks to its leading edge products and system integration capabilities. Revenues for 2004 totaled 542 million euro. Since 2000, Italtel main shareholders are Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Telecom Italia and Cisco Systems. For more information visit www.Italtel.com.
About GoAhead Software
GoAhead® Software is the expert in building integrated middleware for organizations that manufacture equipment requiring extremely high availability. By providing a fully integrated, application ready platform, GoAhead products and services help equipment manufacturers achieve faster time to market and lower development costs. And with over 4000 units deployed around the globe, GoAhead delivers the software and the expertise necessary to ensure success for a broad range of development projects such as wireless base station controllers, softswitches, defense applications and industrial controllers. GoAhead is a privately held company with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. For more information on GoAhead, visit the company’s web site at www.goahead.com or call 425-453-1900.
GoAhead and SelfReliant are registered trademarks of GoAhead Software, Inc.
All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holder.
