GoAhead, make my day

High availability software provider shoots for high 9s Things break. It's the law. Pick one: physics, physiology, Murphy's. They all apply.

Manufacturers of computing and telecommunications equipment, software and systems will continue to invest millions of dollars stringing together as many 9s of reliability as they can. Even so, they will never reach 100% system uptime.

So what's the next best thing?

GoAhead Software is banking on what it calls availability management, a solution that maintains connectivity even in the event of system failure. The company built SelfReliant 7000, a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software solution for developers of telecom infrastructure systems and devices.

"High-availability soft-ware can be off-the-shelf just like the operating systems they support," said James Airy, vice president of marketing for GoAhead.

GoAhead's product focuses on service availability rather than system reliability as it targets manufacturers of routers, switches and CompactPCI platforms.

The clustering software market to which GoAhead belongs was a $367 million market last year and will become one of the fastest growing software markets due to service availability demand, according to IDC.

Started in 1995, GoAhead recently realized some of that market share. Motorola, which also is an investor in the company, signed a $45 million, five-year deal with GoAhead to provide better service reliability for its wireless network products. Motorola will incorporate SelfReliant software into its Aspira IP-based architecture for the wireless Internet.

In addition to increasing the reliability of systems such as Aspira, SelfReliant also provides transaction integrity, which preserves the "client state" of a connection as well as overall management of available systems.

"Telecom people are just not tolerant of failure. GoAhead's software allows critical applications to continue and ride out hardware and software failures while still providing access to operations," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software for IDC.

GoAhead began by providing embedded systems to several different markets in Australia but saw the real opportunities in telecom. It concentrated on creating a solution that was OS-independent, which currently is one of SelfReliant's biggest differentiators.

"Theirs is a fairly clever technology, which went to great extents to build software in a modular fashion and build objects which manage [different] parts of the system and allows vendors to build their own interfaces," Kusnetzky said.

Although GoAhead's software is COTS, the company will rely on partnerships with other vendors to extend its applications.

"You can't do what we do without partners. Most partners have been equipment manufacturers, but in the near future we will partner with network management companies and others," Airy said.

To stimulate partner involvement, the company formed the GoAhead Integration Alliance in October. GoAhead has signed partners in the computing platform area such as CompactPCI, as well as OSs and board-level product manufacturers. They include Consystant, Design Technologies, Force Computers, Intel, Interphase, LynuxWorks, Natural MicroSystems, RadiSys, Wind River Systems and Ziatech.

These vendors are under the same pressure as everyone else to improve time to market.

"This is quite a complex business, so any type of pre-packaged system that can reduce cost and the time it takes to bring a product to market is helpful," Kusnetzky said.

And once a product is in-market, five 9s availability won't be enough. "In five years, it all becomes an Internet infrastructure. A failure anywhere in the infrastructure chain and service is lost," Airy said.

To take availability beyond five 9s, SelfReliant performs seven tasks the company says are required for service availability. The software collects system data in real time from multiple sources. It also maintains a state-aware model of a complete system and provides checkpoint data to redundant components. As GoAhead takes on more network management partners, it will make better use of its ability to detect, diagnose and isolate faults and perform policy-based recovery.

The software also manages configurations, maintenance and upgrades without needing to take cards, modules or systems offline. Lastly, it provides standard interfaces across all system components in a cluster.

"A lot of people are going to have to critically evaluate their processes of bringing products to market, and these kinds of tool sets can increase the time to profitability," Kusnetzky said.