Wind River, a company providing software for intelligent connected systems, has announced its Titanium Cloud ecosystem program for Wind River Carrier Grade Communications Server. According to the company, the program will allow it and its partners to ensure the availability of optimised, interoperable hardware and software solutions that speed time-to-market for service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) deploying infrastructure based on network functions virtualization (NFV).

As of the present, five industry leaders in NFV announced their participation in the program: Brocade, GENBAND, Metaswitch Networks, Nakina Systems and Overture; with additional partners to follow.

Like its Titanium namesake, the Wind River ecosystem will build rock-solid solutions based on the Carrier Grade Communications Server platform. Working closely with Wind River telecommunications experts, Titanium Cloud partners will optimise their standard products, available now, to fully utilise the features of the Wind River platform.

Carrier Grade Communications Server is an integrated portfolio of software elements that enables NFV infrastructure to achieve the carrier grade reliability required for telecom networks. Legacy networks deliver six-nines (99.9999 per cent) reliability, or no more than 30 seconds downtime per year. Platforms based on enterprise-class software designed for IT applications, however, typically achieve only three-nines (99.9 per cent), or almost nine hours of downtime per year, which would result in excessive costs and revenue loss. Carrier Grade Communications Server is the only commercial NFV server solution that enables service providers to maintain six-nines reliability as they transition to virtualized infrastructure, allowing them to meet "always on" expectations. In addition, by accelerating the performance of virtual network functions (VNFs) and providing features that simplify the instantiation, management and maintenance of VNFs, Carrier Grade Communications Server enables customers to minimise both capital expenses (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX) as they progressively deploy NFV in their networks.

Through its Titanium Cloud ecosystem program, Wind River works with industry-leading hardware and software companies to develop an ecosystem of interoperable standard products optimised for deployment with Carrier Grade Communications Server, stated the company. Service providers and TEMs can select these products with the confidence that they have been pre-integrated, validated with Carrier Grade Communications Server, and available for deployment in live networks, providing proven solutions that span multiple layers within the overall NFV architecture and reduce both time-to-market and schedule risk for companies deploying end-to-end infrastructure. Beyond telecom networks, the program also brings the benefit of high-reliability infrastructure to mission-critical Internet of Things (IoT) applications across markets such as healthcare, industrial and automotive.

Developed by telecom experts, Carrier Grade Communications Server is based on Wind River Open Virtualisation with Wind River Linux, optimised real-time Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM++), carrier grade enhancements to OpenStack and Intel Data Plane Development Kit (Intel DPDK) accelerated vSwitch technologies.

• [Editor:Mango]