Service availability is a cornerstone metric consistently used by telecom service providers. Nobody wants the phone system to go down. Internet Protocol data network providers and Enterprise Information Technology departments also share the same concern. Historically, individual equipment providers customize proprietary service availability architectures and feature sets. Each application and hardware platform, then, must be designed to fit with the specific service availability’s schema—a counterintuitive process to today’s market demands for companies to meet new, aggressive time-to-market goals. Maintaining legacy availability architectures is costly both in amortized and lost opportunity costs.

By adopting and porting standard interfaces for systems requiring high levels of service availability, Advantech is able to provide consistency for OS vendors, application developers and network architects. With modular architectures, built on open standard hardware and software, Advantech contributes to greater reuse and a much quicker turnaround for our customer’s new product introductions.

Particluar areas where Advantech has invested engineering resources is in IPMI and HPI. The Service Availability Forums’s Hardware Platfrom Interface (HPI) can be considered as an application programming interface for IPMI that allows high-level applications to access hardware information without the complexity of IPMI commands.

One Advantech implementation example is the fully compliant OpenHPI interface support for our MicroTCA Carrier Hub. This is a good example of Advantech’s growing expertise in this area.