GoAhead Software Announces SelfReliant 5.0 – Early Access Release
Proven High Availability Solution Paves the Way for Adoption of Service Availability Forum Standards
BELLEVUE, Wash. –– September 15, 2005 –– GoAhead® Software, the expert in building integrated middleware for highly available systems, today announced the availability of GoAhead SelfReliant® 5.0 – Early Access Release, its carrier-grade, application ready high availability software platform. The newest release offers implementation of the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) Application Interface Specification (AIS). The SA Forum’s AIS is an open standard that allows developers to write application software that is portable across different vendors’ implementations of high availability middleware. SelfReliant provides continued support for the SA Forum Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) specification B.01.01. This release of GoAhead SelfReliant will support three of the five services outlined in the latest release of the AIS B.01.01 – Cluster Membership Service, Checkpoint Service and Event Service – in addition to significant new functionality made available in SelfReliant 4.0 released June 2005.
More and more telecom equipment manufacturers are using GoAhead’s standards-based, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) product, SelfReliant, to reduce costs and accelerate their time to market. “As the industry continues to drive costs down while the demand for new services goes up, solutions based on industry standards like GoAhead’s SelfReliant and Wind River’s Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition, are helping equipment manufacturers gain an edge,” remarked John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer, Wind River.
Italtel, a leading company in carrier grade products for IP-based Next Generation Networks and Services, purchased SelfReliant 4.0 for its Next Generation Networks and 3GPP-IMS model. While planning later phases of a significant system architecture upgrade, Italtel is evaluating SelfReliant 5.0 – Early Access Release for inclusion once the release is generally available in mid-2006. “Implementing standards-based COTS hardware and software platforms like GoAhead allows us to focus resources on new services and bring these services to market quicker,” said Franco Serio, Business Unit Products/co-Head, executive vice president at Italtel. “Evaluating this early release will help us plan an architecture that takes advantage of the comprehensive high availability functionality in SelfReliant while fully supporting SA Forum specifications.” Italtel, 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%.
“SelfReliant is deployed in more than 6,000 commercial installations worldwide,” said GoAhead CTO, Dr. Asif Naseem. “Because SelfReliant 5.0 – Early Access Release heavily leverages this code base, customers gain the benefits of SA Forum standards on proven software.”
As a founding member of the SA Forum and an active board member, GoAhead continues to lead efforts to drive SA Forum standards. GoAhead was the first software vendor to support HPI A.01.01 and HPI B.01.01 and is now one of the first to implement AIS B.01.01.
SelfReliant 5.0 – Early Access Release: New Features and Functionality
In addition to the features included in the June 2005 release, SelfReliant 4.0 (integration with leading hardware and software platforms, storage management services, SNMP access to SelfReliant MIB, resource virtual IP, hot swap management, alarm management and administrative node switchover), SelfReliant 5.0 – Early Access Release includes the following:
- Cluster Membership Service
This service provides applications with membership information about the nodes in a logical cluster, such as nodes joining or leaving the cluster as well as modifications to specific attributes associated with the node. Notifications of nodes joining and leaving the cluster can be used by system management applications to drive fault management policies such as rebooting a node that has left the cluster.
- Checkpoint Service
This service provides the means of periodically storing state information and other critical data to ensure that, in the event of a failure, the data can be retrieved and the system can resume stateful operation. This is done through the use of checkpoints, which are cluster-wide data entities that can be shared between the nodes in a cluster. Checkpointing allows applications to save state information to a checkpoint that is replicated to other nodes. Most commonly if the active application (or the node it is running on) fails, then the associated standby application can take over as the active application using the state information saved in the checkpoint
- Event Service
The Event Service provides nodes in a cluster with event communication capabilities. This service can be used by nodes to exchange information using a location transparent eventing model. One or more publishers can communicate asynchronously with one or more subscribers via events over an event channel. The type of information that might be exchanged between applications includes fault notifications, alarm notifications, application state checkpoint data, etc.
Remaining AIS functionality – Availability Management Framework, Messaging Service, and Lock Service – will be supported in SelfReliant 5.0 slated for mid-2006.
Pricing & Availability
GoAhead SelfReliant 5.0 – Early Access Release is immediately available to qualified customers. A custom support and consulting services fee is associated with this evaluation. Contact Michael Nitso, Director of Worldwide Sales at (425) 453-1900 for additional product information.
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 telecom and military aerospace equipment manufacturers achieve faster time to market and lower development costs. With more than 6,000 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.
