High-Availability Application Services Platform for Distributed Networking Systems
Enea Element is a suite of high-availability, standards-based (SA Forum/SAF) middleware services that sit between the operating system and applications. Built atop Enea’s LINX interprocess communications foundation, Enea Element extends the functionality of embedded operating systems, providing advanced distributed communications and management functionality typically associated with large enterprise operating systems
It provides core services for synchronizing, instrumenting, monitoring, and establishing communications between applications spread across multiple operating systems and processors. It also provides network supervision, fault management, and shelf management services that make it easy to monitor, repair, configure, provision, and upgrade live systems as they operate in the field.
LINX Communications Foundation
Enea Element’s LINX-based communications provide a foundation for building complex distributed applications that span multiple devices and operating systems. These services make it easy for processes to discover other processes and services, communicate with those processes, advertise service availability, broadcast information to and share information with other processes (publish/subscribe), and monitor other processes for readiness. The system-wide communications services are device and OS independent, providing transparency that enables systems to be scaled and reconfigured without changes to the application code.
Event Logging and Application Monitoring
Enea Element’s event logging and application monitoring services make it easy for developers to instrument their applications, greatly increasing visibility into system operation. Event logging enables application processes to log and report event and state information such as slot/service availability, diagnostics and critical network events such as alarm conditions. Event logs can also be aggregated system wide and archived to persistent media (including remote file systems) for live or post-mortem analysis. Developers and network operators can interactively obtain this information using standard Web browsers.
High Availability (HA) Fault Management
Enea Element delivers all of the services required to build a true non-stop computing platform providing full fault management, including monitoring, detection, recovery, and reporting, for every resource in the system. The HA manager is conformant to the SA Forum (SAF) Application Management Framework (AMF) that, among other things, provides a rich set of redundancy models (1:1, 1:N, N+M, 2N, N-way, and N-way Active) as well as flexible fail-over configurations where active and standby components may reside on the same or different nodes. Active heartbeat monitoring and reactive error detection schemes are employed to ensure the health of key hardware and software components at the system, slot and application levels. A lightweight state checkpoint service preserves state information in the event of failover to a redundant blade.
HA Shelf Management
Enea Element also provides a comprehensive suite of shelf management services for configuring and monitoring individual slots, blades and chassis. It works with shelf management controllers to detect and configure blades, track revision numbers, and monitor key blade-level parameters like temperature, voltage and fan speed. It also supports alarm management and hot swap, which enables individual blades to be inserted and removed from a live chassis.
In Service Upgrade
Enea Element supports In-Service Upgrade, a vital part of any HA solution where “cold” system upgrades equates to a significant device failure, and therefore, “down time”. The In-Service Upgrade manager supports both individual software component and node-level upgrade steps within a running cluster, and with no service impact.
DSP Management
Enea Element HA, software management, and chassis management services even extend to DSP subsystems providing a complete management framework for both the control plane and user/data plane. Specifically, it is integrated with the Enea dSPEED Platform™, for DSP farm management.
Supported Platforms
· RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.0
· Fedora Core 4.0
· Monta Vista Linux 3.1/4.0
· Wind River PNE Linux version 1.4
· MontaVista, Red Hat
CPUs:
· Architecture (x86 and compatibles)
· PowerPC