Comment by AceJohnny2
3 years ago
I have fond memories of QNX.
We used QNX in my last company as the foundation for our router. It was a "tandem" HA system (at least one of our lead architects were formerly from Tandem, the company). It had 2x Control Plane (1 Active, 1 Standby) boards, and 3x Data Plane boards (2 Active, 1 Standby). QNX was an important part of our architecture.
Some features I loved in QNX: process control across the network. I could control processes on any of the processors (running QNX) on any of the boards of the system. Launch a program on a different processor with just the appropriate command prefix (which I forget). Also, driver restart: by the nature of being a microkernel, drivers were "just another process", and if they crashed or hung I could just restart/kill the process. Also, tighter coupling between drivers and files under /dev, unlike whatever Linux is doing, especially for networking devices!
While I'm at it, I want to write down the lifecycle of that company.
The router served as a "security endpoint", meaning it could "terminate" (decode), thousands of IPSec connections. Thus it would serve as the "border router" for a network operator.
The company's big hit was providing this product to NTT Docomo for its LTE infrastructure. NTT had the (turned out unique) architectural challenge where they controlled the base stations, the core network... but not the backhaul (connection between the base stations and core)! The backhaul was on shared leased network. So they needed to encrypt [1], hence the IPSec, and hence the need for a "router" that could receive all these connections and decode them to feed into their Core Network.
I joined the company shortly after they scored that huge contract, when they were flush with money and looking to grow.
NTT Docomo was a pioneer in LTE deployment, so our company tried to sell this operating model to the rest of the world... but no-one took it. Turns out most operators just own their backhaul, so didn't feel the need to encrypt, or at least have the same architecture as NTT.
So our company tried for a while to adapt our router (really, network middle-box, and really, its upgraded next version) for other emerging use-cases, but it was hard to get a grip both in emerging network architectures and against the incumbents (lol the number of times we had bugs with Cisco equipment which we proved was Cisco's fault but nope we just had to work around it).
The company was eventually bought at fire sale price by one that did cheap Software-Defined Networking on commodity hardware. Our expensive router was discontinued.
(Also, fuck Broadcom)
[1] It occurs to me that Snowden's revelations in 2013 happened during my tenure there. However the response of many operators was to have one fat encrypted pipe (which we didn't stand out for) rather than many small encrypted ones (which we did).
(edit: also working with NTT Docomo was another level of reliability requirement compared to the half-assery that was tolerated everywhere else!)
I think I know this company: stoke. mobile backhaul SeGW is a big market, it just stoke didn't make it in that market, and its deployment in DCM was replaced entirely not a few years after.
what replaced them?