OpenSAF Project Releases Major Update to High Availability Middleware
WAKEFIELD, Mass., USA — July 27, 2010 – OpenSAF™ (http://www.opensaf.org) today announced the public availability of Release 4.0 of its high availability (HA) middleware platform. OpenSAF Release 4.0 implements all major functions of the Service Availability Forum™ Application Interface Specification and includes important enhancements to improve scalability as well as hardware and software management. Release 4.0 is available as a free download at http://devel.opensaf.org/wiki/downloads/.
OpenSAF is an open source community focused on developing HA middleware consistent with SA Forum™ (http://www.saforum.org/) specifications, supported by the non-profit OpenSAF Foundation. HA applications and services are key to mission-critical operations in industries such as telecommunications, military and aerospace, financial and industrial automation. As industries continue to migrate from proprietary software to solutions based on open source, there is increasing demand for an open source middleware solution developed from industry standard interface specifications.
Using OpenSAF helps companies get new equipment to market faster, which increases their return on investment. With the enhancements and modularity delivered in Release 4.0, OpenSAF should be seriously considered by anyone planning to deploy next-generation networking devices or mission-critical systems for aerospace, defense or finance. Devices ranging from small access points to large packet switches, with uses that range from military tracking and communications to finance transactions, can all benefit from OpenSAF high availability middleware.
“We are starting to see the deployment of OpenSAF technology by major vendors in the network infrastructure market around segments such as application servers and the control layer,” said Lee Doyle of IDC. “The OpenSAF 4.0 release provides a comprehensive feature set for anyone building highly available platforms, and we can expect that it will be widely adopted across many market segments in the coming years.”
Because OpenSAF is an open source solution, there are additional advantages of implementation that are not found with proprietary implementations. For example, OpenSAF allows users to leverage the work of a broad community of developers, and to benefit from Open Source business models and licensing. OpenSAF users have access to a complete HA ecosystem, including commercial OpenSAF providers, hardware vendors supporting OpenSAF, and software vendors that integrate support for OpenSAF in their applications. OpenSAF adopters also enjoy the flexibility of choosing from multiple suppliers offering the same core, standards-based implementation.
“With Release 4.0, OpenSAF has reached a level of maturity that will broaden its reach and cross-industry impact,” said Monica Hatlen of Ericsson, President of the OpenSAF Foundation. “Release 4.0 in many ways fulfills the vision of the initial OpenSAF community when the project was created, and we are proud to offer it to the world. It delivers a cost-effective, standards-based way to create highly available and reliable networks, and its new management features take a big step toward solving larger problems, including network saturation from increased smartphone use. Consumers also will reap this benefit as mobile traffic continues to grow.”
Operating as a traditional open source project, OpenSAF Release 4.0 represents many person-years of collaborative effort by community members. The OpenSAF code base was re-architected to be much more modular, so that users can now build and install only the features they want, reducing the overhead of maintaining unneeded services. Release 4.0 is the first implementation in the industry of the SA Forum Software Management Framework (SMF), which enables users to upgrade – or roll back — application software from one deployment configuration to another, seamlessly, without affecting service availability. SMF represents the first real industry effort at standardizing a software management interface, and it offers great potential benefits to users who have had to create and maintain proprietary implementations.
Other key enhancements include implementation of the SA Forum’s new Platform Layer Management (PLM) service, which provides hardware abstraction to ease the management of supporting multiple hardware architectures and facilitates virtualization. This can significantly increase scalability and thus the overall usage and ROI of OpenSAF on multiple platforms, within an organization. Release 4.0 also has a number of logging, tracing and debugging enhancements. OpenSAF software is available for free download under the LGPL 2.1 license from http://devel.opensaf.org/wiki/downloads/, and anyone may contribute to the code base.
About OpenSAF
The OpenSAF™ Project is an open source project established to develop a base platform of high-availability middleware consistent with Service Availability Forum™ (SA Forum™) specifications. The OpenSAF Foundation was established by leading communications and computing companies to facilitate the OpenSAF Project and to accelerate the adoption of the OpenSAF code base in commercial products. The OpenSAF code is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 (LGPL v2.1). Anyone may participate in the OpenSAF Project by downloading the code and contributing to the development project. More information about the OpenSAF Foundation is available at www.opensaf.org.