"In January at Linux world in New York, a group of major global
corporations, including semiconductor manufacturers Intel and IBM
and equipment providers Nokia, Alcatel and Cisco, announced they
were joining forces with the Open Source Development Lab to define
a common industry specification for a new class of software called
Carrier Grade Linux.
"Carrier Grade is a term for public network telecommunications
products that require a reliability percentage up to 5 or 6 nines,
or 99.999 to 99.9999 percent. This translates into 5 minutes (5
nines) to 30 seconds (6 nines) of downtime per year. A reliablilty
percentage of 5 nines is usually associated with Carrier Class
servers while 6 nines is usually associated with Carrier Class
switches.
"Carrier Grade Linux is a new category of Linux that is more
robust than the garden-variety enterprise Linux. It promises to
provide a standards-based, open-architecture software platform for
converging telecommunications/data communications systems, which
require virtually zero downtime..."
