Network Infrastructure

Today, Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) and Telecom companies are turning to Linux and open source software as their development platform of choice. Linux and open source can provide the reliability, high availability, and compliance required for carrier grade applications at a lower overall cost. By purchasing a carrier grade Linux development platform off the shelf, carriers can save the cost and effort of developing a proprietary development platform, or roll-your-own Linux, which could easily amount to more than half of the required development effort. Instead, they can focus on delivering value-added applications and software for their end product.

With the dramatic increase in computing power provided by multi-core System-on-a-Chip devices (SoC), it is now significantly more possible than ever to run many more applications in a single system, consolidating them from older, slower, more costly systems. The problem is how to configure the system so that it will accommodate older applications that cannot run on current OS versions, in addition to modern or portable applications, and to be able to manage the environment so that the maximum resource utilization can be ensured, monitored and adjusted at any time. In networks and telecommunications it may be data plane and control plane applications on the same SOC. For SOHO it means consolidating a NAS/WiFi/RGW on a single SOC. Regardless of the market, devices are required to do more with each generation creating huge amounts of legacy software that must be ported to new silicon.

MontaVista Software uses several ways of managing and controlling the resources within the system utilizing multiple approaches to the concept of virtualization that can be deployed using only the features included within the Linux OS as well as proprietary capabilities like Hypervisors. MontaVista virtualization software offers designers new approach for creating virtualized applications while making software more portable for embedded applications.

With the added flexibility derived from the use of these Virtualized systems and utilizing services from MontaVista’s Professional Services group, systems can now be created that dynamically manage performance and power usage, automatically provision virtual systems and run old applications in a container on new more efficient hardware as well as many other options.