Moving Away from ATCA

Why Some Suppliers Say They Are Swearing Off the Telecom Standard

Blade servers are a success. But excitement around AdvancedTCA, the once-hot telecom standard for blade-based architectures, has cooled signifi-cantly in certain circles, as several important suppliers have distanced themselves from ATCA in recent months.

In September, both Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc. sold off their ATCA operations, the former to RadiSys Corp., the latter to Emerson. Then, in announc-ing its new, carrier-grade, version of BladeSystem in December, HP told xchange the product is a replacement of the ATCA-based product it has been selling for nearly two years. And IBM Corp., which once indicated it might embrace ATCA, now disavows ever having had any real interest in the standard.

“We’re moving away from ATCA,” says Christine Martino, vice president of telecom platforms for HP. “We are now replacing our ATCA solution, which we had for a few years.”

She says the ATCA market is becoming a component market, but that HP is a systems vendor, not a component vendor, so it chose to modify its existing commercial blade system for the telecom market. She adds that servers based on ATCA, a blade server standard focusing specifically on the telecom space, don’t offer the economies of scale you get from an architecture like BladeSystem, which applies to both enterprise and telco applications, says Martino. “The cost savings is incredible,” says HP’s Martino.

IBM seems to agree. Rather than introduce an ATCA-based solution, IBM several years ago came out with its BladeCenter solution, which Scott Firth, director of telecommunications marketing for IBM System & Technology Group, says is about half the price for similar performance because it uses off-the-shelf technology, such as processor boards and I/O switches and chassis, versus the specialized telco-only processor boards, hard drive and other com-ponents for which ATCA calls.

The specialized components and basic architecture of ATCA have been criticized for their limited power and performance.

Stephen Low, director of telecom platforms at HP Business Critical Systems, says the ATCA chassis architecture doesn’t allow for memory modules to stand upright in their slots, thus limiting the density of the chassis as a whole.

And IBM’s Firth says the PICMG standard defines ATCA at 200 Watts per slot, but it would be very uncommon for any of the ATCA solutions even to approach that limit because of cooling, memory and other issues. These limitations make it difficult to use ATCA products to address the user-generated video, mashups and other computing-intensive applications we’re seeing today in light of Web 2.0, says Firth.

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