TIA Member Spotlight:
TIA welcomes one of its newest members, Solid Information Technology!
 Solid Information Technology is the leading provider of fast, always-on and affordable database solutions. Solid serves both embedded customers and enterprise end users with a combination of open source and proprietary database products. There are more than 3,000,000 deployments of Solid's database technology worldwide in telecommunications networks, enterprise applications, and embedded software and systems. Market leaders such as Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, EMC2, HP, Nokia and Siemens rely on Solid for their mission-critical applications. Founded in 1992, Solid has worldwide headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and regional offices in North America, Europe and Asia.
 Senior Vice President Marketing and Business Development Paola Lubet has worldwide responsibility for product management and marketing, marketing communications, and the development of strategic alliances and new partnerships for Solid. A 20-year veteran of the software industry, Lubet began her career in Italy before attracting the attention of Apple Computer's European headquarters in Paris, where she held worldwide responsibility for several network and communications products. In 1994, Lubet moved to Oracle Corporation to begin a successful career in product management, marketing and new market development. As senior director of database product marketing, Lubet led the introduction and launch of Oracle8i, which helped Oracle gain a dominant position in the then-emerging e-business space. She also drove Oracle database to market share dominance in the Windows NT space. Lubet has held executive positions at several emerging-growth companies including Blue Pumpkin Software (acquired by Witness Systems), SoftwareMarkets (acquired by Moveit) and Confluent Software (acquired by Oblix). She also spearheaded PeopleSoft's entrance into the business process integration market as vice president, product marketing and technology alliances. Lubet holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the Universita degli Studi di Torino (Italy) and Executive Business Training from the Cranfield School of Management (United Kingdom).
Ms. Lubet spoke with TIA Network staff to tell us more about the organization.
 Please tell our readers about Solid Information Technology’s database solutions.
The solidDB product family consists of two product lines: solidDB for MySQL, an open-source enterprise database; and the solidDB 6 embedded database which is used by eight out of 10 of the world’s largest Network Equipment Providers, because it is particularly well-suited for the communications industry.
solidDB 6 (featured in New Product Spotlight), is a relational database designed for fast, always-on access to data under high throughput conditions to satisfy the real-time demands of communications platforms and applications. It includes both in-memory and on-disk engines, accessed by a single structured query language (SQL) interface. solidDB 6 can be configured using a hot-standby architecture to achieve six 9s data availability (99.9999%) with no single point of failure. This two-node architecture can also be used for load-balancing, increasing throughput by up to 100 percent. solidDB 6 offers significantly lower license fees and total cost of ownership than other leading databases, as well as a "zero admin" capability. solidDB 6 deploys as a compact 3MB executable while delivering complete functionality. Additionally, solidDB 6 is architected to exploit the seismic shift toward 64-bit, multiprocessor/multi-core systems, enabling applications to fully capitalize on their power and benefits. With a highly multi-threaded implementation and an advanced, cost-based optimizer, solidDB 6 leverages the parallelism inherent in these systems. In benchmarks, solidDB 6 has shown linear scalability from two to 16 cores (one to eight dual-core processors).
Please give us an overview on your Telecommunications Solutions.
These types of applications and platforms benefit greatly from the use of solidDB’s in-memory database, which, as the name implies, resides entirely in main memory rather than on disk, making data access an order of magnitude faster than for traditional disk-based databases. Further, solidDB is the only database available that combines a fully-transactional in-memory database and a powerful, on-disk database into a single, compact product, with the unique ability to transparently host part of the same database in-memory and part on-disk, for a “dual engine” approach. This lets developers determine the optimal price/performance of applications. For data associated with immediate response times, the data can be stored in-memory, and for data associated with less stringent service levels or those that it is economically not feasible to have reside in main memory, data can be stored on-disk. Further, this “dual engine” deployment is transparent to the application; a single SQL statement may access data from either or both engines, and in-memory tables can be converted to disk tables and vice versa without changing the application.
solidDB’s advanced replication and high six-9s availability features work in the same way for both in-memory and on-disk tables, whether deployed separately or combined in a “dual engine” manner. One common example of a situation where dual engine in-memory and on-disk deployment make sense is in mobile service applications. In this example, solidDB employs in-memory data tables to authenticate a mobile phone subscriber at the beginning of a call and determines the subscriber’s service options and then uses on-disk tables to archive the call details (length of call, features used, etc.), which are used for reporting and billing purposes. Both the lookup functions and archive functions use the same database and access methods, making storage choices transparent to the application developer. Further, with both in-memory and on-disk options, solidDB offers extremely flexible deployment options. This may come to bear particularly in architectures like chassis-manager configurations where the manager may have a dedicated disk, but line cards are memory-only.
Please describe how Solid Information Technology’s various platform and technology partners as well as its industry affiliations have been instrumental to its success.
Solid partners with companies whose products and services complement our market strategy and product offerings to deliver solutions that remain industry leading, efficient, and cost effective. Our partner program ensures tight integration between Solid's core technologies and those of premier hardware and software companies. We work hand-in-hand with our partners to address expanding market opportunities and to meet the needs of our joint customers.
For example, Solid is an IBM Business Partner. To enable advanced new services with solidDB and IBM BladeCenter, BridgePort Networks chose solidDB for its fixed-mobile convergence solution, which bridges the mobile and broadband networks within the mobile operator's core network. The BridgePort NomadicONE solution utilizes the solidDB database to track essential subscriber call state and registration activity. solidDB's compact, full-featured database technology ensures rapid data access, as well as the scalability to accommodate rapid growth.
As a member of Sun's Partner Advantage program, Solid works hand-in-hand with Sun to address customer business objectives by helping reduce risk and speed time to implementation of solutions. The combination of Sun's Netra HA Suite with solidDB provides a standards-based, application-ready, carrier-grade environment on which developers and system integrators can rapidly develop and deploy highly available applications that are based on proven, fast and affordable products.
Solid also partners with Hewlett Packard. A copy of solidDB ships with every copy of HP OpenView. Solid has several other partners as well and considers them all instrumental to our success. More information can be found on our Web site.
With regard to industry affiliations, Solid recognizes that communications solutions require the broad adoption of open standards. As such, we are an active member of the Service Availability™ Forum, where we contribute to the creation and promotion of open, standard interface specifications.
Tell us the value you gain from your TIA membership.
As a TIA member, Solid appreciates access to current and relevant information about the communications industry and technologies. We also enjoy the discounts at TIA-affiliated events such as NXTcomm.
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