The topic of Highly Available (HA) Systems is a crucial one for the readers of RTC magazine. Vendors to key verticals such as telecommunications and manufacturing have spent years and millions of dollars investing in hardware and software technology focused on maintaining availability at 99.999% levels. These investments have been made for very good reasons. Downtime in certain key application areas is a make-or-break business factor for many companies. Telecommunications and manufacturing provide two of the best examples, but as Web services and enterprise applications continue their evolution, those market segments are also becoming more and more focused on high-availability services as well. Moving successfully into this new era requires novel ways of thinking about hardware and software.

The telecommunications industry is under enormous pressure to revamp its networks and applications to accommodate explosive growth and emerging technologies, and at the same time to ensure that the services delivered are available and dependable. A number of industry trends are contributing to this pressure. Traffic volume continues to grow, especially video and 4G wireless applications. Mobile traffic in general is doubling every 9 months. Competitive intensity due to reduced development cycles is increasing with the rapid shift to standardized platforms such as ATCA and carrier-grade Linux. For network equipment providers, differentiation will increasingly be based on application development, managed services and customer support. Equipment providers require that these new applications achieve the highest levels of availability and dependability while contending with constant pressure to reduce development costs.

This shift is not unique to the telecommunications market, as similar trends are evident in a variety of different markets such as aerospace & defense (A&D), manufacturing and other segments. The service providers and vendors offering highly available systems are increasingly looking to the industry to supply building blocks they traditionally have designed and developed internally. The aerospace and defense industry, particularly in the U.S., is providing a strong incentive to their prime contractors—both product suppliers and system integrators—to include as many commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) building blocks as possible. Similar trends are also emerging in the manufacturing and financial markets. High availability is maturing and becoming something much more than a niche market serving the telecom industry.  

In-House vs. COTS Systems 

This pressure for COTS systems in the HA space is driven first and foremost by straightforward economics. The expense and investment for High-Availability systems has traditionally required a large in-house investment by systems vendors. While these traditional in-house systems were of solid value and solved real problems, the investment demands on these systems have outpaced even the most responsive and innovative vendors. Solving this challenge demands a level of cooperation among industry players. Key standards are needed that create a clear delineation between various functional layers of a highly available system. This standardization of layers—hardware, operating system, middleware and application services—is greatly facilitating the ability of systems developers to put together highly available application-ready systems using COTS building blocks. Figure 1 shows a simple before and after visual of this industry trend. The emergence of multiple COTS suppliers for each of the building blocks is creating a robust ecosystem of COTS component suppliers. This enables system developers to focus their precious, often shrinking resources on things that differentiate them from the competition—applications and services.  

Manufacturing and Industrial Applications

The evolving economics and increasing demand for HA systems can be seen rather dramatically in manufacturing and industrial applications. Recent changes in the adoption of systems and applications in the manufacturing sector have increased the need for HA capabilities. The nature of the operations in this segment is particularly illustrative of the demand and trend toward commercial open standards HA systems.

First and foremost, more and more of the factory floor itself is now based on automation of various types. While this automation takes a variety of forms (lasers, robots, etc.), all the various areas of automation end up stimulating demand and requirements for information technology to monitor, manage and control the various devices on the floor. These IT support systems have an HA requirement by their very nature. Examples include control systems on robots, machine tools and automation. In many application scenarios, the floor systems also need to communicate with each other in real time and share process data. Vendors of a variety of programmable logic controller (PLC) products are enhancing their products with Ethernet capability. This adoption of Ethernet on the factory floor will increase interdependence and risk. Designers, suppliers and management will also be working on shorter cycles, and this means that high availability will increase in importance as an application requirement.