SCOPE Alliance

Wind River is a provider of device software optimization solutions, providing operating systems based on Linux and middleware implementations based on OpenSAF. With today’s network architecture the SCOPE Alliance impacts Wind River on three different levels including the operating system, virtualization and middleware.

Within the operating system environment, the SCOPE Alliance has always focused its efforts on the carrier grade aspects of Linux (one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development). In particular, the SCOPE Alliance has developed profiles around the results of the Linux Foundation (LF) Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) workgroup.

The CGL project is dedicated to improving Linux so that it fits better with the telecommunications industry and Wind River is actively using SCOPE’s profiles and requirements from this work group today.

When shipping Linux operating systems, Wind River maps functional requirements of its solutions against the SCOPE’s operating system profiles and gap analysis. Wind River also uses SCOPE’s recommendations to understand future requirements for developing next generation operating systems.

Glenn Seiler, Director Networking Market Strategy at Wind River said, “We listen to our customers needs and then put these needs into the planning phases of the next releases of new carrier grade operating systems. Customers are asking that our solutions are based on SCOPE’s recommendations and therefore we incorporate SCOPE’s profiles and gaps into our new solutions.

“In addition to this, our virtualization technology will be available next year and when building this we looked at SCOPE’s virtualization use cases and requirements documents to see if our products are consistent with the recommendations SCOPE lay out. By using these documents in the overall planning we can clearly define our virtualization product.”

To date, the SCOPE Alliance has authored three virtualization documents which aim to provide clarity and direction to virtualization suppliers and supporting virtualization technology.

SCOPE’s virtualization requirements have been generated based on a set of business and technical use cases provided by the NEPs/TEMs. The use cases collectively describe the areas where virtualization might be of value to them and are described in the SCOPE Alliance virtualization use cases document.

SCOPE’s virtualization state of the art document focuses on properties and attributes of virtualization solutions that fit within the SCOPE Alliance architecture and, in particular, those useable in embedded and real-time systems.

This document serves as a basis for subsequent documents on virtualization user cases and requirements that the SCOPE Alliance Virtualization Working Group is delivering. As these technologies continue to gain industry acceptance and evolve, the SCOPE Alliance will work to ensure that the NEP perspective is represented.

Finally, SCOPE’s virtualization use cases describe the virtualization use cases collected by SCOPE thus far. Each use case description contains the purpose of the use case, a high-level description of the use case and, where appropriate, a set of specific use case details.

Seiler continued, “In addition to all the operating system and virtualization work we have done, we have also joined the OpenSAF process for building and planning our high availability middleware product and are part of SCOPE’s middleware committee looking mostly at the gaps in middleware based on for SAF specifications. This allows us to understand the barriers to adoption with middleware, and enables Wind River, working with other companies in these groups, to contribute to the open source community and better improve the OpenSAF project as well as the high availability middleware product we deliver.

“Together as an industry we are all very synergistic in what we are trying to accomplish in terms of standards on COTS based solutions and we are proud to be part of the process that drives organizations such as SCOPE. Our customers are mainly SCOPE members and so being part of these organizations positions us a serious player in delivering carrier grade solutions. As a contributor to industry standards, Wind River is dedicated to adopting these and other commercial of the shelf (COTS) products as part of our solutions, helping position us in the overall ecosystem. By adopting SCOPE’s recommendations, we can bring new innovative products to market faster, which are positive for our customers and overall industry, allowing them speed up the time they bring their services/applications to market.”