"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..."
