RTI is the World Leader in DDS

RTI is the world’s leading supplier of software, consulting services and training for the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS) standard.

Since its introduction in 2003, DDS has enjoyed rapid market adoption as a standard for integrating and developing high-performance real-time systems. DDS is a mandated standard for publish-subscribe messaging by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Information Technology Standards Registry (DISR). Programs that have adopted DDS include the U.S. Navy’s Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE) and the System of Systems Common Operating Environment (SOSCOE) for the U.S. Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS).

RTI has been a major contributor to both the development and success of the DDS standard. RTI’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Gerardo Pardo-Castellote, was the lead author of the specification. RTI made substantial contributions based on its experience as a long-time leader in the real-time publish-subscribe middleware market with RTI Data Distribution Service (formerly named NDDS), which was first introduced in 1996.

With the release of a DDS compliant version in mid-2005, RTI Data Distribution Service was the first commercial product to support the DDS interfaces. RTI Data Distribution Service has now been adopted for over 75 projects with DDS requirements. These span the U.S. Navy, Army and Air Force as well as commercial transportation management programs. In addition, RTI has provided DDS training to over 350 developers in courses delivered to RTI customers and hands-on DDS workshops that are open to the general public.

Expertise

With four-times the users of all other DDS suppliers combined, RTI is best positioned to partner with our customers to ensure the successful development and deployment of DDS based applications. RTI’s deep knowledge of the DDS standard is supplemented by over 15-years experience working with customers to develop some the world’s largest and most demanding distributed real-time applications.

To allow DDS users and evaluators to leverage RTI’s extensive expertise when they design their applications, RTI offers an Architecture Study service. With an Architecture Study, RTI’s expert consulting team evaluates your requirements and networking infrastructure. RTI then provides a written report that includes specific recommendations on how to best leverage the rich capabilities offered by the DDS standard.

Customer satisfaction

No standard can succeed without satisfied users. RTI is committed to fostering the adoption of DDS by providing the middleware industry’s best customer support. To this end, RTI regularly surveys its customers to find out how we are doing and to gauge their satisfaction.

In 2006, RTI surveyed over 300 customers who had recently contacted our customer support group. Of those who responded, 97% said that they were satisfied with the support they had received. In addition, 98% said that they would recommend RTI products to others. These results are significantly higher than industry norms.

Proven, Robust Technology

The foundation of RTI’s DDS solution, RTI Data Distribution Service, has been proven in hundreds of designs since 1996. These span a broad array of applications including combat systems; air traffic, railway and roadway monitoring and control; industrial automation; financial systems; and communications equipment.

Other DDS products are based on unproven technology that has only been used for a few specific applications and by a small number of end-users.

To help ensure the integrity of our products, RTI performs a nightly build and test of each configuration. This allows RTI to maintain high product quality while retaining agility when it comes to producing new releases in response to short-term customer needs. Performance and scalability are also meticulously and comprehensively measured on a continual basis with the goal of offering improvements in each release.

Integration

DDS is almost always used in conjunction with other types of middleware that are already deployed in legacy applications or applications without real-time requirements. RTI provides solutions to facilitate interoperability and co-existence between DDS and other standards.

RTI Real-Time Connect integrates DDS with enterprise applications, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and databases using standards such as SQL, BPEL, XML, Web services and JMS. RTI Real-Time Connect provides fully bidirectional run-time bridging between DDS and these other technologies.

For ease of integration, RTI Real-Time Connect is fully optimized for use with Oracle’s popular database and SOA products. As an Oracle distributor, RTI is able to provide our customers with a turnkey data distribution and data management solution integrating DDS with Oracle Databases.

CORBA support facilitates its co-existence with DDS. With RTI Data Distribution Service, the same data type definitions and run-time instantiations can be shared by both the DDS and CORBA portions of an application. In addition, RTI offers a complete, integrated DDS and Real-Time CORBA package through a partnership with Object Computing, Inc. (OCI), a leading supplier of CORBA support and services.

Performance

RTI Data Distribution Service consistently wins independent benchmarks against other DDS solutions and other middleware technologies, including for latency, throughput and scalability. In some benchmarks, RTI has demonstrated 10x higher performance than the next fastest DDS solution.

Transport Flexibility

RTI offers the broadest and most flexible transport support of any DDS product, including:

• Multicast and unicast over UDP
• IPv4 and IPv6
• Shared memory for intra-node communication
• A pluggable interface for custom transports
• The ability for applications to concurrently use multiple different transports.

RTI’s Real-Time Publish-Subscribe (RTPS) wire protocol—the basis for the newly adopted DDS interoperability standard—is higher performance than TCP, requires less network traffic, and does not incur the overhead associated with establishing and managing TCP connections.

Multicast as supported by RTI is superior to broadcast, since broadcast packets have to be received and processed by all nodes regardless of whether they host a subscriber or not. This introduces gratuitous processing overhead to all nodes that are not interested in the content.

Multicast also provides much more scalable performance than unicast. With unicast, data has to be individually sent to each subscriber. For data that is being broadly distributed, the need to send the same update multiple times with unicast puts a substantial demand on the network. It also introduces significant latency for the unfortunate final recipient.

High Availability and Fault Tolerance

RTI Data Distribution Service employs a true peer-to-peer architecture with direct end-to-end communication between applications. There is no shared server process or node. Every application is completely independent. A failure in any process or node will have no direct impact on any other application.

Other DDS solutions rely on shared servers, either per-processor or per-network. These servers introduce single points of failure and potential performance bottlenecks.

Tools

RTI and our partners offer the most comprehensive set of tools for accelerating the development, debugging and optimization of DDS applications.

• RTI Analyzer – a system-level visualization and debugging tool that discovers all DDS objects on a network, organizes them, and shows their properties such as Quality of Service (QoS) settings
• RTI Scope – a data visualization and logging tool that captures DDS data traffic
• RTI Protocol Analyzer - a network level analysis tool that captures packets, shows packet contents, and analyzes bandwidth use.
• SL Enterprise RTView – easily build user interfaces or dashboards that capture and display real-time information from DDS and other data sources
• Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect – DDS aware UML modeling for RTI Data Distribution Service

Platform Support

RTI Data Distribution Service provides the broadest platform support of any DDS solution. Over 46 platforms are available, including:

• Linux (x86, x64 and PowerPC processors; 32- and 64-bit libraries)
• Solaris (SPARC, x86 and x64 processors; 32- and 64-bit libraries)
• Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
• Windows CE and Windows Mobile (x86 and ARM processors)
• VxWorks (x86 and PowerPC processors)
• LynxOS, LynxOS-178 and LynxOS-SE (x86 and PowerPC processors)
• INTEGRITY (PowerPC processors)
• QNX (x86 and PowerPC processors)

RTI also offers C, C++ and Java programming interfaces.

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