A high-availability middleware provider called GoAhead Software Inc. at NXTcomm this week unveils software called SAFfire 2.0, which the company said features the most comprehensive implementation to date of the Service Availability Forum’s Application Interface Specification.

     “We really do expect it to be a turning point for this spec,” said GoAhead Chairman and CEO Jim Ewel of SAF’s AIS, which defines how applications interface with middleware. The SAF first published the AIS spec about three years ago, but later did a “B” spec and just last year published the first “real, complete” spec on AIS, referred to as B.02, explained Ewel. Still, he said, the spec has gaps, so GoAhead in SAFfire 2.0 did complete implementations of information model management service, cluster membership service, checkpoint service, event service, message service, log service and notification service implemented in AIS. Additionally, it delivered the following functionality not yet standardized by the SA Forum: platform management, alarm management, hot swap management, replicated data store and embedded systems management. And it did “deep” preintegration with the IBM BladeCenter T, Performance Technologies cPCI and Radisys Promentum ATCA platforms.

     The overarching idea of the SAF’s work and this GoAhead announcement is to move the communications industry, and others with a need for high availability solutions, forward in the drive toward availability and adoption of standards-based, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions that can result in quicker time to market and that don’t lock customers into single-vendor solutions.

     "The telecommunications industry adoption of COTS technology will accelerate with open standards solutions like GoAhead SAFfire and IBM BladeCenter delivering new levels of availability and reliability," said Jim Pertzborn, vice president telecommunications, IBM Systems and Technology Group. "By utilizing this COTS-based solution, telecom providers can reduce the time required to introduce new services, reduce total costs and, more importantly, improve end-user customer experience."