On the development of standards based carrier grade platforms
The remarkable pace of advancement in communications technologies and the exponential growth of the market have pressured network equipment providers into producing more features in products in a much faster rate at lower costs. We advocate the use of standards based availability management middleware in carrier grade platforms as a building block for network infrastructure products, and buying constituent components as a strategy for achieving the costs and cycle time reduction goals. We examine the required capabilities of the availability management middleware, articulate the needs and show a solution for the platform's support of software upgrade with no or minimum service outage, and propose dependability benchmarking as a means of choosing an off-the-shelf high availability middleware for the platform. The development of the appropriate standards and their supporting technologies, together with the preliminary results indicate that this approach can potentially deliver a good return on investment.
dependability benchmarking high availability middleware service availability open standards software architectures online software upgrade robustness testing