“CGE is available today and delivers a true, OSDL-compliant carrier-grade product. Unlike distributions that just provide patches to a generic server product, MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 3.0 was designed and comprehensively tested, from the ground up, to address telecom availability needs and OSDL feature requirements,†said Glenn Seiler, director of product marketing, MontaVista Software. “MontaVista has made significant contributions to Open Source in the area of high availability including the OpenIPMI project and our CompactPCI Hot Swap subsystem. CGE also includes technologies that are only available from MontaVista, such as online debugging and patching of deployed applications.â€
MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 3.0 advances the company’s initial Carrier Grade Edition 2.1 product, providing a robust software platform to meet the demands of carriers and service providers. CGE is the first product to be fully compliant with the industry specifications for Carrier Grade Linux released last year by the Open Source Development Lab – the OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Specification 1.1. The specification includes standards such as the Linux Standards Base (LSB), IPv6 (including IPSECv6 and MIPv6), SNMP support, and POSIX interfaces for timers, signals, message queues, semaphores, event logging, and threads.
“The Carrier Grade Linux Working Group provides an excellent example of OSDL working with the Open Source community and commercial vendors to deliver market solutions for enterprise customers in telecommunications,” said Timothy Witham, OSDL Director. “MontaVista Software has played a strategic role in this initiative and we’re pleased that they are the first to design a product for full compliance with the OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Specification.”
MontaVista Linux CGE 3.0 is designed specifically to address the needs of telecommunications equipment manufacturers who face ever-increasing time-to-market pressures. These networking OEMs need to deliver scalable, high performance solutions with real-time support. CGE enables them to do so, and to lower their cost and time to deployment. CGE 3.0 enhances standard Linux with additional high reliability and availability features for deployment in carrier-grade environments, and delivers optimized support for telecommunications platforms from leading providers such as Force, IBM, Intel, Motorola and RadiSys. (See addendum for supporting quotes.)
With its high performance, real-time Linux kernel and high availability features, CGE offers significant advantages for Telecommunications Equipment Providers (TEMs) and Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) beyond “enterprise†Linux. CGE is based on an open architecture, incorporating standard interfaces that provide greater flexibility and portability. CGE 3.0 will support multiple hardware solutions based on CompactPCI and volume based rackmount servers.
Key features of MontaVista Linux CGE 3.0 include:
— Platform support for hot swap, remote boot, disk-less and console-less operation.
— High availability features including driver hardening, watchdog timer support, Ethernet redundancy and aggregation, RAID 1 support, journaling file system support, and disk and volume management support.
— Features to meet serviceability requirements such as resource monitoring, kernel crash dump and analysis features, structured kernel messages, dynamic kernel probing, hardware error logging, and remote access to the event log.
— Targeted development and deployment tools including debugger support for threaded programs, kernel debugger support, and a kernel crash dump analysis tool, the MontaVista Field Safe Application Debugger and Runtime Application Patcher.
— MontaVista Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) driver implementing a full-featured IPMI driver and message handler in the kernel. The driver provides the application programmer a complete and easy-to-use interface to IPMI. (Note: MontaVista will use the IPMI driver and libraries to support the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) Hardware Platform Interface API, later this year.)
— Performance down to millisecond real-time (
For more information on some of the key new features, visit the MontaVista Technology Highlights web page.
Availability
MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 3.0 is available now. For more product information, please visit http://www.mvista.com/cge/index.html.
ADDENDUM
Industry Support for MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition
With more than a dozen major design wins since it was released last year, MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition has resonated very strongly with customers in telecommunications and networking. It has been chosen and deployed by a growing number of global telecommunications companies in a wide range of cutting-edge applications including:
— Wireless Communications (specifically Wireless to wireline communication gateway for Rail system; Switch for mobile infrastructure)
— Scalable platform for switches and call servers
— Location registers and base station controllers for GSM operators
— Internet security products such as VPN, secure routers
— Media gateway and Softswitch – Voice over IP network solutions
— “All IP†networks with such applications as media gateway controllers
— Managed infrastructure equipment such as DSLAMs and routers.
“MontaVista Software’s development of carrier-grade software aligned with OSDL specifications and running on Intel silicon and building blocks, reinforces the growing movement of the communications industry to off-the-shelf modular building blocks providing improved cost, choice, and time to market,†said Ron Peck, director of marketing, Communications Platforms, Intel Network Processing Group.
“MontaVista Linux CGE 3.0 support of the OSDL CGL 1.1 specification re-enforces industry alignment around a common set of features and is a milestone in the maturity of the CGL ecosystem,†said Hernan Vega, vice president, IBM Global Telecommunications Industry. “The enhanced CGE 3.0 features, when combined with IBM systems, provide a highly scalable, reliable and cost effective platform for Next Generation Network solutions. IBM is working with MontaVista Software to certify CGE 3.0 on IBM BladeCenter servers to further address the specific requirements of telecommunications equipment manufacturers.â€
“MontaVista Software’s OSDL compliant Carrier Grade Linux Edition enables our mutual customers to build high availability solutions with an open standards-based operating system,” said Chris Williams, Force Computers vice president and general manager of product and strategic marketing. “MontaVista Software continues to provide leadership delivering a robust COTS (Commercial-Off-the-Shelf) platform that is needed by Network Equipment Providers for a broad array of communications applications.â€
“We are excited about the availability of the Carrier Grade Linux from our partner, MontaVista Software,†said Venkataraman Prasannan, senior director of marketing with RadiSys Corp. “Our mutual customers can now take advantage of all the benefits of Linux such as open source and no license fees with the added benefit of having the high availability features to build their five-nines platform. Such products along with open standards reinforce our customers move to standards based architectures and platforms.”
Effective ISV Ecosystem
MontaVista Software is working closely with the world’s leading Network Equipment Providers and their preferred Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to create a comprehensive ecosystem of fully validated middleware, tools and applications for advanced Telecom and Datacom solutions. Some of these key ISVs include:
Borland
— Continuous Computing
— Eternal Systems
— GoAhead
— Hughes Software Systems
— IBM Software Group
— Parasoft
— Solid Information Technology
— TimesTen
— UXComm
— Versant
Industry Standards
MontaVista Software has a strong commitment to providing carrier-grade solutions and is activelyparticipating in several industry initiatives to define carrier-grade and high availability standards. These include the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Working Group and the Service Availability Forum. Carrier Grade Edition already supports current specifications including PICMG 2.16 and OSDL CGL specification 1.1. MontaVista Software will support PICMG 3.0 and SA Forum Hardware Platform Interface with CGE later in 2003.
About MontaVista Software
MontaVista Software is a leading global supplier of systems software for intelligent connected devices and associated infrastructure. MontaVista powers the embedded revolution by providing GNU/Linux-based open-source software solutions. Founded in 1999 by real-time operating system (RTOS) pioneer James Ready, MontaVista offers a family of products under the MontaVista Linux umbrella that address broad-based software developer needs encompassing applications ranging from communications infrastructure to consumer electronics. Multiple Editions of MontaVista Linux are available including Professional, Consumer Electronics and Carrier Grade, along with complementary technology products providing powerful Java and graphics development capabilities.
Headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Sunnyvale, Calif., MontaVista Software is a privately held company funded by leading investors such as Alloy Ventures, US Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, WR Hambrecht + Co., IBM, Intel Capital, Sony, Panasonic (Matsushita), Toshiba America and Yamaha Corporation. For more information about MontaVista Software, please visit http://www.mvista.com.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. MontaVista is a trademark of MontaVista Software Inc. All other names mentioned are trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks of their respective companies.
Contacts:
Joe Samagond,
Director of Marketing and Corporate Communications,
MontaVista Software Inc.,
Phone: (408) 328-9234,
E-mail: jsamagond@mvista.com
Patricia Colby,
PR Strategy and Business Development,
Pacifico Inc.,
Phone: (408) 293 8600 x340,
E-mail: pcolby@pacifico.com”
