GoAhead and IBM to Offer Standards-Based, Pre-Integrated High Availability Solution for IBM BladeCenter
Network Equipment Providers Speed Time-to-Market and Reduce Costs with Application-Ready Platform
ITU TELECOM WORLD, Hong Kong – December 4, 2006 – GoAhead® Software, an expert in high availability middleware for systems requiring 99.999% availability or greater, and IBM today announced a standards-based high availability solution for IBM BladeCenter T. The integration will also be offered on the forthcoming IBM BladeCenter HT. By leveraging GoAhead SelfReliant® high availability middleware pre-integrated with IBM BladeCenter, network equipment providers can significantly accelerate their time to market while reducing project costs.
“Standards-based components enable network equipment providers to build a complete platform with best-in-class solutions at each layer in the stack,” states Jim Ewel, GoAhead CEO. “The integration between these components, however, is not trivial. With this solution, GoAhead and IBM are offering that integration out-of-box, enabling the equipment providers to significantly speed time to market.”
GoAhead is a member of Blade.org, the open, technical community dedicated to creating solutions for the BladeCenter platform and enhancing the blade ecosystem. This integrated solution jointly developed by GoAhead and IBM includes validated capabilities such as platform management and comprehensive high availability and system management. Key features include resource discovery and system model instantiation, shelf manager integration, alarm management, hot swap management and integration with IBM systems management capabilities. This functionality is accomplished through the use of the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) Hardware Platform Interface (HPI).
“As IBM continues to lead the blade server industry and offers BladeCenter systems for the telecommunications industry, we are seeing a demand from customers for an application-ready platform,” said Jim Pertzborn, vice president, IBM Telecommunications Industry Servers. “With this solution from IBM and GoAhead, equipment providers can ensure carrier grade availability without the burden of integration.”
One such customer leveraging the IBM and GoAhead combination is Sonim, a leader in the emerging market for mobile VoIP push-to-talk (PTT) solutions for enterprises. Sonim recently announced commercial availability of the first fully redundant implementation of Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) PoC (PTT over Cellular) 1.0, the new IMS-compliant standard for PTT interoperability.
“Sonim sealed its position as first to market with a cost-efficient, OMA PoC application that achieves 99.999% availability,” states Paul Longhenry, vice president of business development for Sonim. “This was largely possible by leveraging standards-based solutions, IBM BladeCenter and GoAhead SelfReliant, which enabled Sonim to accelerate its development cycle and focus on the application layer.”
Another customer is BridgePort, a leader in mobile VoIP convergence. BridgePort utilized both IBM and GoAhead to ensure 99.999% availability its next generation NomadicOne product family, which extends mobile identity across IP networks to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) devices such as dual-mode mobile phones, PDAs and laptops, as well as any SIP-end device, such as wired and cordless SIP phones.
"BridgePort's use of GoAhead's current middleware ensures the high availability and reliability of our NomadicONE platform," said Steve Blumenthal, CTO of BridgePort Networks. "In the next generation, we will be able to leverage the IBM Blade Center T and GoAhead integration to unify the high availability features of hardware and software under a common platform."
About GoAhead
GoAhead® Software provides high availability (HA) and management software for equipment manufacturers responsible for ensuring availability of mission-critical systems and applications. GoAhead products and services help telecom, defense and aerospace equipment manufacturers achieve faster time to market and lower development costs. With more than 15,000 deployments worldwide, GoAhead SelfReliant® is the only proven, standards-based HA solution on the market. GoAhead delivers the software and the expertise necessary to ensure success for a broad range of development projects such as wireless base station controllers, Node Bs, softswitches, defense applications and industrial controllers to name a few. Every day, industry leaders such as Motorola, Alcatel, Italtel, Lockheed Martin and Honeywell entrust their HA needs to GoAhead. GoAhead is a privately held company with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. For more information on GoAhead, visit www.goahead.com or call 425-453-1900. For press information, contact Lacy Williams at 425-468-5417 or lwilliams@goahead.com.
GoAhead and SelfReliant are registered trademarks of GoAhead Software, Inc. All other brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holder.
