OpenSAF, an open source community with projects focused on high availability middleware, is hosting the 2011 OpenSAF Conference this month, May 17-18, 2011, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The OpenSAF Conference (formerly Developer Days) is a technical conference for the open source, high availability middleware community.

The core goal of OpenSAF projects is to develop HA middleware consistent with the Service Availability™ Forum (SA Forum) specifications. There are many components necessary to help ensure a successful OpenSAF ecosystem. For example, educating on how to implement OpenSAF into legacy platforms and explaining why OpenSAF is a viable option worth implementing are crucial pieces of the story. Because of the diversity of those who impact the ecosystem, OpenSAF has broadened this year’s Conference topics beyond those strictly for developers, attracting users, adopters and academics who are interested in obtaining a general overview of the OpenSAF project architecture, features and code base.

The 2011 OpenSAF Conference will educate on the best practices for implementing the OpenSAF Project architecture into diverse platforms and will share how implementing OpenSAF solutions can impact the bottom line.

Expanding Education Topics

This year’s Conference offers a broad set of sessions, from presentations highlighting real-world examples and technology demonstrations to presentations tied to industry hot topics and panels featuring users of OpenSAF. To view the full conference agenda, please visit the 2011 OpenSAF Conference agenda webpage.

This year’s Conference will feature a two-part session titled Case Study: Benefits of Migrating Legacy Applications to OpenSAF, presented by Ericsson. The presenters will speak to their real-world experience and share results and feedback from actual implementations and explain what to consider when migrating legacy applications to OpenSAF. Attendees will learn about the key benefits, including quickly integrating third-party products and avoiding development costs when a solution to a given problem is already available in the marketplace.

Additionally, this year's OpenSAF Conference will feature a video demonstration presented by HP showcasing how the new AIS service from OpenSAF Release 4.0 – the Platform Management Service (PLM) – makes it possible to build “hardware aware” cluster solutions via the use of hardware management stacks such as OpenHPI. This session, titled Video Demo – Stateful Failover and HPI Interaction will show how PLM’s ability to “talk to the hardware” is an important feature when building a cluster solution focused on preempting and preventing the effects of hardware outages. This session also features a demo which will show how a cluster can be made aware of imminent hardware failures.

Another topic that will be covered at the OpenSAF Conference is OpenSAF and alternate solutions: How does OpenSAF complement other technologies such as virtualization[]? This presentation will be presented by MontaVista, who recently joined OpenSAF to help contribute to next-gen high availability middleware. There are a number of emerging hardware and software technologies that impact the usage and designs of highly available systems. OpenSAF-based service availability middleware is very complementary to virtualization, multi-core and many other advanced hardware and software technologies. This session will explain the broader technology landscape and will educate on how high availability (HA) and service availability (SA) fit into that landscape.

In addition to virtualization, cloud[] computing is another topic top of mind for both developers and engineering managers. In the presentation, Carrier Grade Requirements for Cloud Computing: A SCOPE Alliance Perspective, the presenter will define the differentiating factors that can enable the usability of cloud computing for telecom and real-time services. In this context, he will include the role and importance of inter-cloud architectures as well as the use of private, public and hybrid architectures for real-time and telecom services.

Looking forward, OpenSAF is focused on continuing to provide the resources to diverse members of the high availability ecosystem to help grow market for the open source implementation of SA Forum specifications and increase deployments of OpenSAF to help ensure network uptime in environments from telecommunications to military and aerospace. Please visit the OpenSAF Conference webpage after the conference to download the archived 2011 OpenSAF Conference presentations, including the slides for the sessions outlined above. For more information on OpenSAF, please visit www.opensaf.org or contact admin@list.opensaf.org.