UnitedLinux Pushes Into Telecom Market

An anonymous reader writes "It would seem that UnitedLinux is pushing into the telecomms market according to this article at ITWorld. Is this the first market they are trying to meander into? I perticularly like this quote: 'Telecommunications grade servers must meet specific standards regarding electromagnetic interference, electrostatic discharge, corrosion, grounding and seismic durability.' Hmmmm."

Comments

just to test that +1 bonus situation

[RealAlaskan]

Here are some links on carrier grade linux. Usually I'd post this anonymously, but I want to test ...

one, two (looks interesting), three (looks interesting and authoritative).

Re:just to test that +1 bonus situation

[nels_tomlinson]

There is a +1 bonus if your karma is high enough, so your posts start out with a score of two instead of one. From reading some threads recently, I gather that that's changed, and now you can set how you will see that bonus in your preferences.

If you want it to be the way it was before, go to the user comments page, and set

Karma Bonus (modifier assigned to posts where the user has good karma)

to be +1. Or set it to -6 if you never want to see posts from people with lots of karma.

Carrier Grade Linux

[Znonymous Coward]

Aparently Linux vendors see "Phase 3 style" profit in carrier grade linux. Even Red Hat is getting into this. Lets hope it works out better than embedded linux.

NEBS Certification

[Tony]

NEBS certification (to which your favorite quote refers) is a hardware standard pretty much required for most telecom installations. I have no clue why a Linux distribution representative is talking about hardware, unless they plan on selling compact-PCI or VME-bus hardware with UnitedLinux pre-installed.

Anyway, the NEBS certification requires testing for the amount of time the hardware smokes after being set on fire, how well it withstands water damage, and such. This is the kind of hardware you buy when five nines just aren't enough.

Re:NEBS Certification

[lowlands]

> This is the kind of hardware you buy when five nines just aren't enough.

In over 10 years in telco datacenters I have come across lot's of equipment that was NEBS certified and did *not* have 5 nines requirement. Actually there are many elements in a telco's network that don't meat that criterium by design. Too darn expensive. To give you an example: 1 linecard for a Lucent 5ESS switch (stone age pile of junk that indeed runs close to forever) is over $1,000. That's a lot of money to recoup from the one or max two subscribers that are hooked up to that card. Although NEBS is partially a requirement for 5 or 6 nines, there are many other things to consider like software.

Needless to say I have never seen a Microsoft 5 nines solution. Would be surprised if it actually excisted. I did have a field day once on a Internet Call Diversion trial at WorldCom's datacenter in central London where those silly people from Alcatel actually brought in a couple of Windows boxes. The Alcatel people were even surprised that WCOM did not accept a solution that had to be rebooted at least every twelve hours. And that was on a slow day in the trial environment :) We won the order off course.

Cheers, Patrick

Re:NEBS Certification

[michael_cain]

NEBS compliance is so much fun! Two of my favorite requirements:

• There are very tough requirements about things a circuit board must not outgas when heated (eg, by a fire). Many of the outgas products from heating a board made with standard fiberglass and epoxy are highly toxic. This is dangerous for central office craftpeople who are expected to be trying to extinguish the fire without the benefit of the kind of breathing equipment a fireman would normally be using.
• For every N frames more than six feet tall (I think that's the height limit, it's been a while since I really looked), the vendor must provide a stepladder made of oak. Basically it's because oak has been tested to be nonconductive, meet strength requirements, etc. No one has been willing to pay to certify some other material. Sort of like the obsolete processors in the space shuttle -- no one has been willing to pay the cost for certifying another processor to NASA specs.

The only thing I can think of off hand that might be affected by Linux (versus some other OS) would be alarms. Central office equipment is often required to provide alarm signals using relative large voltages or currents, which would require device drivers for relay boards or other ways of handling that much power.

On a related United Linux Note

[orpheus2000]

IBM, AMD Become Part of UnitedLinux

This should have been somewhere on Slashdot...