OpenSAF Announces High Availability Middleware Release 4.0

OpenSAF 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.


"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."


OpenSAF is an open source community focused on developing HA middleware consistent with SA Forum specifications.

The group said its OpenSAF code base has 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.
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