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October 25, 1999, Issue: 1084
Section: News
Wind River to respin Tornado for net markets
Loring Wirbel
ALAMEDA, CALIF. - Wind River Systems Inc. has never made a secret of its desire to fine-tune the Tornado development system for specific real-time embedded markets, an effort that will take shape this fall with a debut of three flavors of Tornado for Managed Switches, or TMS.
Wind River hopes to appeal to both OEMs and manufacturers of network processor and switching chips with three versions of its TMS: for pure Layer 2 work-group switches, enhanced Layer 2 switches for departmental duties and true Layer 3 switches that embed Internet Protocol routing duties.
The Wind River moves illustrate the lengths to which the embedded world has gone to support networking over the past year. Many companies-including most of Wind River's competitors-are acquiring protocol stacks as well as complete middleware solutions to enable their embedded products to be designed into Web-connected applications.
This is only the first Tornado family for networking, said David Fraser, vice president and general manager of the company's Wind River Networks division. Developers will see similar products for residential access, including RTOS kernels and services for cable modems and digital subscriber line modems, he said. Later, a product suite for public carrier equipment, beginning with WAN edge devices and eventually extending to the heart of telco central office switches, will also roll out.
Wind River has enlisted the help of two companies it believes will prove crucial to offering Tornado in the networking space. Xact Inc., a small protocol-stack design house, performed some original work for the TMS family, and later was acquired by Wind River. Completion of the Layer 3 version of TMS required bringing in some route protocol talent from RouterWare Inc., which Wind River has also purchased. Since the work on RouterWare products is not as far along, the Layer 3 version of TMS will not be offered until mid-2000 or so.
Trends on company's side
A couple of factors in the LAN switching market are critical to Wind River's TMS program. First, the commoditization of Layer 2 switches, slowly creeping into Layer 3, helps by bringing new offshore OEMs to the Wind River fold. Glenn Flinchbaugh, product manager for TMS, said that a company like Cisco Systems Inc. might sell a switch design for an OEM to use, but never provides the Cisco Internetworking operating system. That implies such companies will have to turn to Wind River by necessity.
Greater comm influence?
The commoditization of switch systems offshore also helps small semiconductor switch startups move up the value chain in middleware functionality, he said, once again enhancing the role played by Tornado.
Another factor that may increase the popularity of standard RTOS kernels
is the arrival of common application programming interfaces for network processors, Flinchbaugh said. Wind River is joining the Common Programming Interface (CPIX) coalition, though it remains to be seen whether CPIX standards will help the producers of RTOS kernels and associated development systems.
Wind River is following a path that its rival Integrated Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has explored for pSOS derivatives. Fraser said that Wind River still faces some limited competition from smaller specialists like QNX Inc., as well as OEMs developing routers and switches in Linux.
But for the most part, Wind River appears to be dominating the communications sector, a trend the company hopes to accelerate with its Tornado for Managed Switches line.
Copyright ® 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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