Service Availability: Principles and Practice

Chapter 2

The Birth of the Service Availability Forum

Francis Tam

Nokia Research Center, Helsinki, Finland

This chapter examines the benefits of adopting open standards of service availability in general for carrier-grade systems, and the Service Availability Forum specifications in particular. It includes the rationale behind the development of the Service Availability Forum from both the technical and business perspectives. It elaborates on the scope and approach taken by the Service Availability Forum middleware, together with the justification, and explains how it enables a service availability ecosystem for the telecommunications industry.

2.1 Introduction

On 4 December 2001, a group of leading communications and computing companies announced an industry-wide coalition to create and promote an open standard for service availability (SA) [22, 23]. The announcing companies included the traditional network equipment providers, IT companies, hardware suppliers, and software vendors. A series of questions ensued. What was going on? Why were these companies working together? Why did they need an open standard for SA? What were they going to standardize?

These were the typical questions one heard after the SA Forum launch events. In order to answer these questions, one has to take a step back and take a look at what was happening at around the time of the late 1990s and early 2000. For example, the rapid technological advancements in the communications sector, the incorporation of ...