Today’s top-of-the-line, high-bandwidth, sophisticated services offered by telecos and service providers require computing and switching platforms of higher density and greater power than ever before, certainly greater than what was afforded by the previous generation of CompactPCI (News - Alert) (cPCI) equipment, which was limited to about 1.3 Gbps of throughput.

 

CompactPCI’s successor, the Advanced Telecomputing System Architecture form factor, better known as AdvancedTCA or just ATCA (standardized as PICMG (News - Alert) 3.0), defines a hefty resource board with an 8U x 280-mm form factor and 1.2 inch slot spacing, providing more 2 dimensional room for circuitry, as well as inter-slot headroom for “tall” CPU/sink and CPU/fan/refrigeration components. Initially designed for a ZD backplane connector capable of 5 Gbps throughput for switch fabrics such as PCI Express – 10 Gbps Ethernet (10GbE)-enabled blades can now be handled by ATCA platforms.

 

More than 100 companies helped develop the ATCA specification, including Intel. Today we see ATCA boards and chassis being used for various carrier-grade wireless and voice-over-packet infrastructure applications such as softswitches, Mobile Switching Center (MSC) servers, Media Gateways (MGs), Signaling Gateways (SGs), Media Servers, Home Location Registers (HLRs), Signaling Control Points (SCPs), Serving GPRS Service Nodes (SGSNs) and Gateway GPRS Service Nodes (GGSNs).

 

And now, Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson (News - Alert) and an enabler of ‘Business-Critical Continuity,’ today added a new multi-core processor blade to its growing AdvancedTCA blade portfolio. The ATCA-7350 combines quad-core Intel Xeon processors with a wide range of memory options, plus redundant 10GbE support, to deliver the performance and flexibility required by server-type communications network elements. This product, together with the recently announced ATCA-9305, further extends Emerson Network Power’s (News - Alert) Embedded Computing business within the ATCA market.

 

The new ATCA-7350 processor blade supports a wide range of applications, including media servers in IPTV and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) broadband networks. The blade is based on two 2.13GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors and features a main memory capacity of up to 32GB. Dual hot-swappable and RAID-capable on-board disk drives can provide either enterprise-class disk performance and storage capacity in network datacenter applications, or dual automotive or solid-state disks in central office applications requiring rugged Network Equipment Building Standard (NEBS) capability.

 

Increasing the blade’s flexibility, the PICMG 3.1-compliant fabric interface provides two 10GbE interfaces for applications requiring higher network throughput in the backplane. Several Rear Transition Module (RTM) configurations are available for external connectivity to suit application requirements, providing two or four optional 1GbE interfaces, support for 10GbE, a USB 1.1 management interface, and two optional 2Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces.

 

To meet the varying needs of the communications industry, the ATCA-7350 can be configured with a variety of software offerings, ranging from firmware-only to fully integrated and verified software operating environments. The ATCA-7350 also features an intelligent platform management control (IPMC) management subsystem, which provides monitoring, event logging and recovery control, and serves as the gateway for management applications to access the platform hardware.

 

The ATCA-7350 will be available in the fourth quarter of 2008.