Moving Away from ATCA

Why Some Suppliers Say They Are Swearing Off the Telecom Standard

Todd Etchieson, vice president of communications networking product management at RadiSys, says his company’s ATCA strategy is to deliver a completely integrated application-ready platform — including a DSP, processor and other blades, a switch, shelf and blade management, a carrier-grade Linux OS through its partners and high-availability middleware — on which carriers and TEMs can build their software applications. Because of their need to capture market share and their more limited R&D resources, he adds, it’s the Tier 2 and Tier 3 TEMs that are the most interested in this kind of solution, whereas the Tier 1 TEMs like Nortel and Nokia have thousands of engineers and decades of history to developing their own solutions, so most of them still are bringing in components (like chassis, blades, etc.) and doing the integration themselves.

The fact that the Tier 1 TEMs are HP’s primary focus and that Tier 1 TEMs as a rule are not ready to buy systems-level solutions is why Keate believes HP sold off its ATCA business.

“I think some people are confusing vendors leaving a market with consumers leaving a market,” adds Etchieson. “I think there’s assumption that while HP is leaving this market, this market is dying. But although [HP is] a leader in high-tech, they are not necessarily a leader in ATCA.”

But what about the technological limitations that HP and IBM attribute to ATCA?

“There’s always a trade-off in how much power you can pump into a shelf, how much heat you can get rid of, how much processing you can put into each slot,” says Etchieson. In any case, he adds, TEMs and their service provider customers are nervous about how much processing power to allow for per slot. “Frankly,” he says, “they want to limit, because if something happens like a tornado, a flood, if you have too many eggs in one basket, you’re in trouble as a service provider.”

Adds Keate: “It also goes very much by application. What is that service provider trying to accomplish? If you look at the core of the network, ATCA has plenty of performance and power.” If a service provider is pumping video, he says, ATCA is good a solution; however, it will have some challenges in actu-ally rendering video. “But that’s a case where you’ll have huge rack-mount servers for that, and blade servers then switch and move data,” he explains.

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