MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 2.1 now shipping

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Annette Oevermann writes: MontaVista Software Inc., the company powering the embedded revolution, today announced that MontaVista Linux® Carrier Grade Edition 2.1 is available immediately to customers. This revolutionary new product is the industry’s first commercial, carrier-grade quality Linux distribution. Carrier Grade Edition is targeted for edge and core telecommunications solutions, including applications for the converging IP and voice networks, optical networks, signaling gateways and Voice over IP (VoIP) gateways.
“The market is demanding a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Linux solution for telecommunications and MontaVista Software has delivered,” commented Jim Ready, president and CEO, MontaVista Software. “By leveraging our significant technical expertise, both in Linux software technology and in providing telecommunications solutions, MontaVista has delivered a standards-based, open architecture communications platform for the industry’s next-generation telecommunications systems.”

MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) enhances standard Linux with key features for deployment in carrier-grade environments. It is designed specifically for network equipment providers as a standard, modular, communications platform. Based on open source projects initiated by MontaVista Software and other open source contributions, Carrier Grade Edition provides essential high availability features, including CompactPCI hot swap drivers, redundant Ethernet and RAID1. Carrier Grade Edition also delivers a hardened driver architecture, resource monitoring and fault management services, and other carrier grade capabilities.

Carrier Grade Edition offers significant benefits to network equipment providers who face ever-increasing time-to-market pressures. These networking OEMs need to deliver scalable, high performance solutions with real time support. Carrier Grade Edition enables them to do so, and to lower their cost and time to development and deployment.

Carrier Grade Edition provides a robust software platform to meet demands from carriers and service providers for service availability. With its high performance, real-time Linux kernel and high availability features, CGE offers significant advantages beyond standard or “enterprise” Linux. CGE is based on an open architecture, incorporating standard interfaces for flexibility, portability and longevity. Moreover, Carrier Grade Edition offers developers a choice of vendors at various levels of integration — a choice currently denied by providers of closed and proprietary systems.

“Network equipment providers are moving to Intel architecture-based carrier grade modular platforms, attracted by advantages in price, performance and vendor choice,” said Ron Peck, director of marketing, Communications Software Programs of Intel’s Network Processing Group. “MontaVista Software, with its proven technology expertise, especially in telecommunications, and its alignment with Open Source Development Labs’ (OSDL) Carrier Grade Linux specifications, is poised to give these providers the carrier-class performance, levels of flexibility and speed-to-market they require.”

Carrier Grade Edition supports industry-leading PICMG 2.16 compliant CompactPCI platforms and standard rack mount systems based on the Intel IA-32 architecture. These include systems from IBM, Intel, Motorola, Radisys and Force Computers.

“Carrier Grade Edition from MontaVista Software enables our mutual customers to build high availability solutions with an open, standards-based operating system — Linux,” said Venkataraman Prasannan, senior director for RadiSys. “This move to open standards promotes economy of scale and improves our customers? time-to-market and time-to-revenue.”

Carrier Grade Edition Attributes

Key high availability attributes of the Carrier Grade Edition include:
* Fault management framework
* Diagnostics: On-line and off-line
* Performance: Support for sub-millisecond real-time response
* Scalability: From embedded single board computers to large SMP servers
* Openness: built on systems and standard APIs

Features

MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition builds on the company’s expertise in embedded Linux and high availability. The new product incorporates all the features of the company’s flagship product, MontaVista Linux Professional Edition, including rich hardware support, a fully preemptible kernel and real-time scheduling, small footprint and journaling file systems. It also builds on technologies from the MontaVista High Availability Framework, such as PICMG 2.12 hot swap capabilities (hot replace and hot insert), redundant Ethernet, multi-hosted RAID, and resource monitoring and event management subsystems. Key new features for Carrier Grade Edition include driver hardening, high resolution timers, improved diagnostic capabilities (kernel dynamic probes, multithreaded core dumps, kernel crash dump and analysis tools), POSIX event logs, enhanced kernel panic handler and enhanced fault management framework for applications and middleware.

Commitment to Industry Standards

MontaVista Software is committed to providing carrier-grade solutions and actively participates inindustry initiatives to define carrier-grade and high availability standards. These include the OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Working Group (with Alcatel, Cisco, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, MontaVista Software and Nokia) and the Service Availability Forum (with Force, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, MontaVista Software, Nokia and RadiSys). Emerging specifications from these organizations will be incorporated into MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition.

Availability

MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition 2.1 is available immediately. Subscribers to the MontaVista High Availability Framework product will be able to migrate seamlessly and without additional cost to Carrier Grade Edition. Subscribers to MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition will be able to upgrade to a next-generation version of the product when industry carrier-grade Linux specifications gain further definition. Support for additional CPU architecture platforms is also planned. For more product information, please visit http://www.mvista.com/cge/index.html or email to info@mvista.com.

About MontaVista Software Inc.

MontaVista Software Inc. powers the embedded revolution by providing open-source systems software solutions for embedded developers. Founded in 1999 by real-time operating system (RTOS) pioneer James Ready, MontaVista Software’s principal products include MontaVista Linux® Professional Edition and MontaVista Linux® Carrier Grade Edition. The Professional Edition is a Linux-based embedded source and binary distribution, cross development platform and a set of tool kits for x86/IA-32, PowerPC, StrongARM, MIPS, SH, ARM, XScale, Xtensa and other microprocessor architectures. The Carrier Grade Edition is a second-generation high availability product that is an ideal Linux platform for telecommunications and carrier-grade applications. MontaVista Software also provides several complementary technology products addressing specific customer needs such as the Java development environment, high availability technology, powerful graphics toolkits and more. MontaVista offers developers a family of products and services for embedded design and development targeted for applications ranging from communications infrastructure to consumer devices.

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, Panasonic and Sony Corporation. For more information about MontaVista Software, please visit http://www.mvista.com, email to info@mvista.com or
call (408) 328-9200.

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