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networkZONE Products for the week of July 6, 2009
Green Hills Software Says…
Networking Platform Adds Support for Freescale’s VortiQa Software Products
Integration accelerates time-to-market for networking equipment based on QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors
Green Hills Software, Inc., a leading provider of secure operating systems and advanced routing/switching software, has announced the integration of the Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking with Freescale VortiQa software for networking equipment. Customers using this combined offering can accelerate product development and optimize application performance of multicore-based designs. The combined offerings are being introduced across the four VortiQa software product lines that Freescale announced today for service provider equipment, enterprise equipment, small business gateways and SOHO/residential gateways.
“A solutions-centric approach for overcoming the expanding challenges in today’s network and communications equipment designs is critical for our customers,” said Sathyan Iyengar, vice president of Software Products for Freescale's Networking & Multimedia Group. “With the addition of Green Hills’ support for our VortiQa software product line for networking equipment, our joint customers can rapidly realize optimized, multicore-based products.”
High availability and secure isolation between networking subsystems in the Platform for Secure Networking is assured by INTEGRITY , the world’s first Common Criteria EAL6+ certified operating system technology. The INTEGRITY advanced security architecture prevents denial-of-service attacks while guaranteeing optimal real-time performance for packet processing applications. INTEGRITY secures your networking equipment at the core of the design. The advanced security architecture and inherent security policies of INTEGRITY support safe, separate execution of routing, switching, management and guest operating systems while providing the ideal platform to host the networking and security functionality available in the Freescale VortiQa software products.
“Freescale’s single and multicore communications processors are driving design innovation and system consolidation in every area of networking equipment,” commented Dan O’Dowd, chief executive officer and founder of Green Hills Software. “By coupling these processors with the industry’s most secure, integrated networking platform, customers can implement scalable, highly available networking and communications products that are designed to protect against the most aggressive compromises facing the Internet.”
To support rapid prototyping, design and deployment of next-generation networking and communications equipment, Green Hills has put together a number of integrated solutions based on Fulcrum Microsystems’ 1G and 10G FocalPoint switch silicon and reference platforms. The FocalPoint switch products provide highly scalable low latency solutions for the data center and include advanced features for CEE and DCB. These 1U rack mountable and ATCA form factor platforms are based on Freescale QorIQ and PowerQUICC communications processors and include: Green Hills GateD – the industry’s benchmark solution for commercial-grade routing and switching software, INTEGRITY, TCP/IP v4/v6 host and routing stacks, network management, Green Hills Software’s secure guest OS virtualization architecture and integration with the Freescale VortiQa line of software products.
“With the combination of Green Hills’ and Freescale’s networking solutions, our data center customers can develop highly integrated next-generation platforms, optimized for use with our innovative FocalPoint 1G and 10G family of silicon products with the shortest development time,” said Mike Zeile, president and chief operating officer of Fulcrum Microsystems. “The integrated solutions approach, embraced by Green Hills’ Platform for Secure Networking, is key to our customers’ success.”
EN-Genius Says…
Green Hills’ highly-secure Integrity OS and networking services are an especially good pairing with Freescale’s comms-oriented QorIQ and PowerQUICC processors because they provide a software backbone that’s as flexible and robust as the silicon they are running on. You may wonder, however, why this is such a big deal since Freescale already offers its own operating systems and security capabilities for its chips. You may also wonder why one would consider purchasing a premium solution like Green Hills when there is so much code available from the open-source community. While there is no one answer that justifies the cost of buying a single seamless package instead of cobbling together a solution from several free or low-cost sources, the added reliability, scalability, and dramatically shortened development cycles should tip the balance toward Green Hills for many applications.
One of the things I really appreciate about the Integrity OS is its scalability. It is equally at home running as a compact stand-alone kernel on a modest embedded system as it is serving as a guest OS on a large blade server that’s powered by Green Hills’ secure virtualization architecture. Green Hills has also worked hard to make the Integrity OS very platform-independent, with versions currently available for all of Intel’s multi-core and Atom processors as well as the ARM and Freescale architectures. As one would expect, Green Hills says that it can be ported to nearly any other processor if necessary.
Of course, one could say similar things for Linux (or several other operating systems) but one of the other things you buy is the time that Green Hills put into integrating their products seamlessly with Freescale’s hardware platforms and their associated software products. Both the Integrity OS and its associated virtualization environment have been engineered to work well with Freescale’s VortiQa a set of security intrusion prevention and firewall applications that were important elements derived from their acquisition of InToto a year or so. All the work has been done that allows VortiQa to run directly on top of the Integrity OS or as an application within the guest OS of your choice on a virtualized system.
Green Hills has also ported its near-turnkey commercial switching and routing application for Freescale silicon. It provides a complete package that can be customized and integrated seamlessly with the base OS and Freescale’s VortiQa security apps. Like the Integrity OS, the networking software can be scaled to support anything from small pizza box CPE products to high-capacity TCA/uTCA blades.
Another advantage of going with a non-DIY system is Green Hill’s extensive test infrastructure they’ve built at their development center that serves as both a development facility for their products as well as an interoperability test facility for their customers. According to Green Hills, their collection switches, routers, Spirent and Ixia test gear they’ve assembled in the lab puts more capacity than a small city at the customer’s disposal for making sure their gear works under the toughest conditions, and complies with all interoperability requirements. When used in conjunction with the Green Hills/Freescale ecosystem, you should get dramatically shortened time to market as well as much more stable and maintainable code that’s easily upgraded – either in production or in the field.
Networking Platform Product Page
Freescale VortiQa Security
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