New OpenClovis Project Builds Communication Systems
By: Rob Reilly
Monday, May 15, 2006 01:40:56 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6235/1/
The Challenges of Carrier-Grade
"The network is becoming incredibly complex."
These words rang especially true as Jim Lawrence, CTO of OpenClovis Inc., described his company's new open source project and how it will affect the telecommunications industry.
Formerly known as Clovis Solutions, Inc., OpenClovis has announced it has launched the OpenClovis Software Project, contributing more than 500,000 lines of carrier-grade application service code to developers under the GNU General Public License.
Moving packets quickly and routing around trouble are paramount in the telecom industry, where disruptions affect service quality and cost clients real money. Considering that a vendor or ISV may have thousands of discrete nodes, requiring a typical 50-ms working response time, the complexity is indeed daunting. Traditional vendors, such as Verizon and British Telecom, will demand (and get) high scalability and availability.
OpenClovis produces a high-quality, modular, and reusable set of software components and tools that vendors can use to quickly build new communications systems.
The heart of the project is a middle ware package called the OpenClovis Application Service Platform. The package provides a highly hierarchical and highly distributed standards based tool set that configures hardware and software building blocks, so vendors can comprehensively manage their network infrastructures. The package supports off-the-shelf products using AdvancedTCA commodity hardware, such as HP's Proliant line. It works on both 32- and 64-bit servers.
Old and New
Network hardware vendors have long enjoyed differentiation in the marketplace, by designing and controlling their own lines of proprietary hardware. All of that has been changing over the last couple of years as development costs have steadily risen.
Many will recall the aftermath of the Dot Com boom, when R&D dollars and investment capital dried up, virtually overnight. ISVs and software companies have faced intense competition to deliver products and services, at an ever accellerating rate. The big boys had the same problem as smaller tier II vendors. Neither could distinguish themselves by middleware alone. Lawrence said that the key to today's telecommunication industry is 'time to market' and that Open Source Software is helping redefining that term.
According to Lawrence, large providers, like AT&T have been steadily moving toward Open Source for quite a while. Open Source has also helped small vendors by facilitating development and testing, at low cost. Reducing barriers to adoption is a prime objective of OpenClovis. The company offers a GPL type license for free/community use and an OpenClovis style license for commercial use.
The company has worked extensively with the Service Availability Forum to help define common standards of hardware and interoperability, among telecommunication and software vendors. Other forum members include Intel, Motorola, Ericsson AB, Alcatel, Wind River, Sun, and Symantec. The forum also seeks to foster broader component supplier choice and an expanded market for standard products.
Taking a Look
The OpenClovis free and commercial sites are both online as of May 15th. Like many open source projects of late, the company has opted to maintain a dual-licence structure. According to the OpenClovis Web site, "GPL licensees must conform to the requirement that their OpenClovis linked software as well as any changes to OpenClovis are also made publicly available under the GPL. Commercial licensees have the freedom to keep their software proprietary and distribute OpenClovis as per the conditions of the commercial license. Note that code auto generated by the OpenClovis IDE is considered to be under the license under which the IDE was obtained (GPL or commercial)."
The software is Eclipse based and is available as a runtime evaluation version on the free site. The source is also available and includes the OpenClovis Application Service Platform, the Integrated Development Environment, several third party packages needed by the OpenClovis software, and an evaluation kit.
The OpenClovis site features a nice touch: stocking the support page with links to documentation, white papers, screen shots, and feature requests. There are also links to the OpenClovis forums, bug reports, and a mailing list.
Naturally, the commercial site provides information on company history, investor news, products, and support services.
OpenClovis has assembled a complex middleware package to help build and manage new telecommunications systems. Their team of nearly 100 employees have produced over 500,000 lines of code for the various OpenClovis packages. The company seems to be on firm ground and has a growing base of clients.
Rob Reilly is a consultant, trend spotter, and writer. He is a contributing editor for LinuxToday. He advises clients on portable computing, presentation technology, and business process integration. You can visit his web page at http://home.earthlink.net/~robreilly.