OpenSAF fosters high availability implementations for net-centric warfare

Story

September 02, 2011

A key element of ensuring system uptime is building systems with open specifications, such as the high availability middleware specifications developed by the OpenSAF community. This enables systems integrators to achieve service availability while focusing on differentiating at the application layer and through system integration.

As network-centric warfare continues to evolve, the military requires increasingly diverse and complex systems and applications. Additionally, existing systems and applications are becoming more critical because of the requirement for increased connectivity and integration to other systems. This is creating new demands for uninterrupted operation of network infrastructures. And a variety of modern military applications require this high level of service availability.

Service availability implies that a service is always available and therefore operational, regardless of hardware, software, or user fault and is often overlooked until an outage happens (Sidebar 1). The term is often used to describe scenarios where systems can remain in the field, even if they have experienced hardware or software faults. This type of solution is complex, but it also minimizes the impact of faults and automates system recovery, thereby simplifying the maintenance demand on a warfighter or operator.

 

Sidebar 1: Availability terminology described

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Service availability is becoming increasingly important in military and aerospace because downtime of these applications can have severe consequences. For example, when a command post is engaged with warfighters in the field, continuous contact with command and control is critical for success. Losing contact could result in a loss of key information to ensure safety. Additionally, in the military embedded computing arena, one of the recent trends is placing sensors, such as video surveillance devices, on all types of manned and unmanned platforms. (Predator drones are one example of this.) An interruption or downtime in this case could result in the loss of views of activity on the battlefield. OpenSAF (www.opensaf.org) middleware helps to ensure that high availability is achieved in such systems, to avoid these potential consequences (Sidebar 2).

 

Sidebar 2: The SA Forum: A closer look

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Pitfalls of downtime

The costs of network downtime and the frequency of outages have been reported to be significant in a wide range of industries. Though not specific to the military and aerospace industry, a recent survey from software company Neverfail notes that 23 percent of survey respondents have had an outage for more than one full business day, while only 5 percent reported never experiencing an outage (http://extranet.neverfailgroup.com/download/Neverfail%20Survey%20Final%201.pdf). In addition, 54 percent of respondents did not know the cost of downtime. However, of those who did know the cost of downtime, 16 percent rated the hourly cost to be more than $10,000, 7 percent rated the hourly cost between $5,001 and $10,000, and the remainder rated it as less than $5,000.

Real-world examples within the military and aerospace industry related to downtime are the FAA’s National Airspace Data Interchange Network (NADIN) system outages. Starting in 2008, the FAA’s NADIN system, which tracks more than 1.5 million flight schedules, had experienced numerous costly service outages. These outages resulted in delays of up to six hours at as many as 100 nationwide airports at a time, largely impacting many customers across the country. The most upsetting aspect of the outages is that the FAA was unable to detect the cause of the problems in the system.

The cost of faults associated with the growing use of unmanned aerial systems in modern warfare is another increasing concern. The current concept of operations for these systems is to automatically return the vehicle to its base when an outage occurs – incurring significant operational costs and in some cases, undermining the mission and risking lives. Implementing platforms that leverage OpenSAF high availability middleware can help alleviate these issues of high availability by ensuring that all system faults are detected and isolated – and then automatically recovering the system and returning it to service.

New technologies for achieving high availability

As they seek to address the challenges like the aforementioned, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) within the military and aerospace sector face multiple challenges when providing highly available systems for customers. Intense warfighter demand, budget constraints, and industry competition in the market (Figure 1) place pressure on the system integrators and OEMs. Proprietary platforms that address high availability are costly to develop, both in terms of hours invested and expenses such as R&D. Proprietary platforms are also often complex and difficult, as well as costly to maintain and to upgrade.

 

Figure 1: OEMs face intense competition while developing and delivering highly available technologies to the military and aerospace market.

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Although achieving high availability can be costly and challenging, appealing COTS options that leverage open specifications are surfacing in the marketplace. Utilizing open specifications enables collaboration, extension, and a common environment for applications, making it easier and less costly to combine applications into a single platform as the system evolves. One COTS path, OpenSAF, is based on SA Forum specifications, which address the requirements of availability, reliability, and dependability for a broad range of applications. The latest OpenSAF Release (Release 4.1) is the most comprehensive implementation of SA Forum specifications available in the market, covering high availability middleware.

SA Forum specifications offer several key benefits. For example, use of open specifications helps enable system designers to leverage the commercial ecosystem for the commodity components of the system such as system management and high availability. This allows designers to focus on the differentiating application layer rather than the entire system. OpenSAF offers a modular approach to integrating high availability middleware, which allows scaling across a wide range of applications, eliminating the high costs associated with implementing a complete set of services into a platform. With a common standards-based infrastructure in place, applications can be ported, combined, and updated in a more seamless manner. This common system infrastructure streamlines overall system management, saving time and money.

SA Forum specifications define services via use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for continuous hardware and software operation. At a high level, the SA Forum standards have two major programming interfaces – the Application Interface Specification (AIS) and Hardware Platform Interface (HPI).

HPI is a specification for managing a highly available hardware platform that is hardware independent and represents the platform-specific characteristics of the physical hardware in an abstract software-based model; HPI provides functions for monitoring and controlling the modeled resources.

Services from the AIS specification that can be implemented to ensure high availability include platform management, application management, health monitoring, fault management, cluster membership, events and messages, and checkpoint. These services manage the full range of system resources, including applications, clusters, nodes, and the platform infrastructure (hardware, operating systems, and so on).

Taken together, these AIS services and HPI provide virtually all capabilities needed for constructing a complete high availability system (Figure 2).

 

Figure 2: SA Forum enabled COTS platform

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Service availability is mission critical in net-centricity

As adoption of network-centric defense operations continues, service availability has become increasingly mission critical in deploying military applications. It is anticipated that the requirements for five nines availability and higher will become more prevalent, along with increased usage of open standards-based commercial systems. OEMs and system integrators can build platforms with technologies such as OpenSAF high availability COTS middleware to meet these demands while also reducing costs and time-to-market.

Mike Houston is Marketing Work Group Chair of the OpenSAF Foundation and Marketing Director at GoAhead Software. OpenSAF is an open source community with projects focused on high availability middleware that align with SA Forum specifications. For more information, send email to: [email protected].

OpenSAF Foundation 503-619-4109 www.opensaf.org