On the development of an open standard for highly available telecommunication infrastructure systems

With the advent of end customers in the telecommunications market wanting more new services at an increasing rate, and the dependability level of such services as high as the traditional ones, network infrastructure equipment manufacturers and application developers are faced with the challenge of delivering such services in ever-shorter cycles. By standardising programming interfaces for developing and deploying highly available applications, the Service Availability Forum attempts to tackle the issue of reducing development time and costs for highly available services. In this paper, we discuss the mission and activities of the Service Availability Forum. We also outline our vision for an application interface that has the potential as the much needed solution.