Service Availability Forum
| Private 501(c)(6) | |
| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Headquarters | Beaverton, Oregon, USA |
| Website | http://www.saforum.org |
The Service Availability Forum (SAF or SA Forum) is a consortium that develops, publishes, educates on and promotes open specifications for carrier-grade and mission-critical systems. Formed in 2001, it promotes development and deployment of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology.
Service availability is an extension of high availability, referring to services that are available regardless of hardware, software or user fault and importance.
Key principles of service availability:
The traditional definitions of high availability have their roots in hardware systems where redundancy of equipment was the primary mechanism for achieving uptime over a specific period. As software has come to dominate the landscape, the probability of failure is often much higher for applications than it is for hardware and so these concepts have been extended encompass an overall view of service availability where downtime, irrespective of its cause, is an exceptionally rare event. Services and applications should always be available, whether it is during abnormal system operation, scheduled maintenance, or software upgrade, for example.
SA Forum support commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology for uninterrupted service availability, application portability and seamless integration. Collaborating industry organizations include the following:
Specifications for carrier-grade service availability include:
The SA Forum free educational materials enable self-guided training the SA Forum specifications:
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