Jessica Schieve

The Two Ends of the Developer Spectrum: Cool Apps and the Network

I just spent the day at the Intel Developer Forum, where I listened in on Renee James’ keynote address on the Intel user experience. The presentation covered many topics, but the two of most interest were Intel’s AppUp program and Wind River Network Acceleration Platform. At first glance, these two topics seem at opposite ends of the developer community, but they are actually very closely connected. 

On one side of the developer community is the AppUp program. AppUp is designed to enable the development of applications for mobile and other intelligent connected devices. These applications come in many shapes and forms: social media, video, gaming, and financial transactions, to name a few. They are all being developed to run on the Intel Atom processor. Many of the applications are being designed to leverage wireline and wireless broadband to the networks.

Now enter the other side of the Intel developer community: applications for the network infrastructure. All those bandwidth-intensive applications being developed through the AppUp program need the network to deliver their content reliably, securely, and at lightning speed. This is where AppUp meets Wind River Network Acceleration Platform.

On main stage today, Ms. James highlighted a major breakthrough in packet processing performance. Utilizing a new packet processing paradigm, Wind River Network Acceleration Platform, running on Intel Xeon processors, can deliver 10.5 million packets per second per core. Even better, this unmatched packet acceleration solution scales linearly across all cores. This means ultrafast performance to deliver all that content developed by the AppUp applications.  

Check out this animation from today’s presentation.

Coming full circle, the main stage presentation on the Intel user experience shined a spotlight on two opposite ends of the developer community: end user application development and the network applications that will deliver the ultimate connected user experience. 

A good user experience goes well beyond the cool device in your hand

As thousands of people converge on Mobile World Congress the hype will be on the latest and coolest devices that will connect to the next generation wireless broadband network.  People will be in awe of the newest “thin as paper” notebooks and the “do everything” smartphones.  Device Manufacturers and Service Providers will demonstrate killer video and data applications running every kind of mobile device your can imagine.  But to win the mindshare and pocketbook of the Consumer takes more than cool gadgets.  It requires delivering the best user experience possible.   And, the expectation is not only that these devices look cool and do cool things, but they will also do everything promised at breakneck speed. 

Far away from the device in your hand is the network that processes, routes, and delivers every call, chat, email, or packet of data you send.   The equipment in the network: access points, base stations, node controllers, gateways to name a few, can make or break the user experience.  The growing expectation of the network is that it will always be on, will always make your voice call, will deliver video uninterrupted, and will do it all without any delays.

As most of the visitors to Mobile World Congress give their attention to the awesome device eye candy, the real cool story are the announcements about the latest and greatest multicore hardware and software technologies being developed for to improve the performance of network equipment.  3G and 4G networks are quickly adopting multicore technologies to increase network packet processing performance and to enable better scalability to handle the increasing broadband demand and multimedia traffic.  Multicore technologies are rapidly becoming the standard foundation for the next generation of network equipment delivering greater performance and ultimately a better user experience. 

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, look for multicore announcements from all the leading hardware vendors: Cavium, Freescale, Intel, LSI, and NetLogic.  And be sure to check out the announcement Wind River made about its multicore virtualization support made earlier this week. If you are planning to use multicore technologies in your next network product, be sure to read the Multicore Checklist for Success.

Carrier Grade Starts with Finding and Fixing Software Defects Before Deployment

Did you know 25% to 50% of deployed device failures are due to software defects? This statistic should be nowhere near this high, considering there are a few very good solutions out there today to help reduce the number of defects in software code.

In the networking and telecom industry, if equipment fails and brings down the network it can cost a service provider or operator millions of dollars in lost revenue or even lost customers (read this white paper to learn more). If you are an equipment provider and the failure is associated with your application, the lost revenue cost could very well be passed on to you. And count on the network failure to be all over the headline news like the one that hit the New York Times.

To prevent these kinds of failures many equipment providers build carrier grade features and functionality into their products. Equipment with "carrier grade" characteristics can achieve 99.999% (five nines) availability. Putting this in terms we all understand, carrier grade equipment experiences less than three minutes of downtime per year. Non-carrier grade equipment can experience anywhere from 30 to 300 minutes of downtime per year.   This is a huge difference.

One of the key characteristics of a carrier grade network element is reliability. Increased application reliability can be achieved through tools that help to identify and debug software defects in network elements and applications before they deploy in the field.  Check out this demo of the Wind River Test Management solution.

Do you build carrier grade equipment?  What steps do you take to ensure your equipment or applications are highly reliable?  How much of your development process is spent on testing software? Do you use automated software testing tools?