Distributed comms software boosts availability

Enea has developed an enhanced version of its Linx interprocess communications (IPC) services product for distributed telecomms systems.

Enea Linx provides a number of new features that increase overall service availability, including protocol/feature negotiation, priority messaging and support for Enea Element in-service upgrades.

Protocol/feature negotiation enhances availability by ensuring compatibility between all Enea Linx versions, thereby facilitating seamless IPC upgrades for fielded systems.

Priority messaging increases service availability by maintaining communications in systems that become congested due to a fault condition.

In-service upgrades increase availability by enabling software upgrades to be performed on live systems without disrupting service.

"Enea Linx is the best IPC technology for building portable, scalable, distributed telecom software", says Terry Pearson, Vice President of Marketing for Enea.

"Protocol/feature negotiation builds on this future-proof pedigree, enabling equipment makers to take advantage of the latest Enea Linx upgrades on a node by node basis without compromising compatibility with existing Enea Linx implementations".

Upgrading the basic communications protocol in a deployed system is a large problem.

Because systems typically depend on this protocol for overall system management, upgrading all nodes with the new version of the protocol is often not possible.

Protocol/feature negotiation future proofs systems by making future releases backward compatible with previous releases.

When developers install a new version of Enea Linx on a particular node, it automatically communicates with other Enea Linx peers (on other nodes) to identify and default to a common set of features.

This allows individual nodes to be added and upgraded with the latest version of Enea LINX without affecting the rest of the system.