The Service Availability Forum (SAF or SA Forum) is a

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources ...

that develops, publishes, educates on and promotes open specifications for

carrier-grade In telecommunication, a "carrier grade" or "carrier class" refers to a system, or a hardware or software component that is extremely reliable, well tested and proven in its capabilities. Carrier grade systems are tested and engineered to meet o ...

and

mission-critical A mission critical factor of a system is any factor (component, equipment, personnel, process, procedure, software, etc.) that is essential to business operation or to an organization. Failure or disruption of mission critical factors will resu ...

systems. Formed in 2001, it promotes development and deployment of

commercial off-the-shelf Commercial off-the-shelf or commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) products are packaged or canned (ready-made) hardware or software, which are adapted aftermarket to the needs of the purchasing organization, rather than the commissioning of ...

(COTS) technology.

Description

Service availability is an extension of high availability, referring to services that are available regardless of hardware, software or user fault and importance. Key principles of service availability: * Redundancy – "backup" capability in case of need to

failover Failover is switching to a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware component or network upon the failure or abnormal termination of the previously active application, server, system, hardware component, or network in a computer net ...

due to a fault *

Stateful In information technology and computer science, a system is described as stateful if it is designed to remember preceding events or user interactions; the remembered information is called the state of the system. The set of states a system can o ...

and seamless recovery from failures * Minimization of mean time to repair (MTTR) – time to restore service after an outage * Fault prediction & avoidance – take action before something fails The traditional definitions of high availability have their roots in hardware systems where redundancy of equipment was the primary mechanism for achieving uptime over a specific period. As software has come to dominate the landscape, the probability of failure is often much higher for applications than it is for hardware and so these concepts have been extended encompass an overall view of service availability where downtime, irrespective of its cause, is an exceptionally rare event. Services and applications should always be available, whether it is during abnormal system operation, scheduled maintenance, or software upgrade, for example. SA Forum support commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology for uninterrupted service availability, application portability and seamless integration. Collaborating industry organizations include the following: * CP-TA ( Communications Platforms Trade Association): ensure interoperability on xTCA platforms. * PICMG (

PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group PICMG, or PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, is a consortium of over 140 companies. Founded in 1994, the group was originally formed to adapt PCI technology for use in high-performance telecommunications, military, and industrial comp ...

): develop open specifications that adapt PCI technology for use in high-performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications. * SCOPE Alliance: enable and promote the availability of open carrier grade base platforms based on COTS hardware / software and Free and open-source software (FOSS) building blocks, and to promote interoperability between such components. * The Linux Foundation: promote, protect, and standardize Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms.

Specifications

Specifications for carrier-grade service availability include: *Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) *Application Interface Specification (AIS) *Mapping Specifications **Java Mapping Specifications ** HPI-to-AdvancedTCA Mapping Specifications

Educational resources

The SA Forum free educational materials enable self-guided training the SA Forum specifications: *Application Webcasts *Tutorials *Whitepapers

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.saforum.org Technology consortia

Description

Specifications

Educational resources

See also

References

External links