RadiSys Gives ATCA a Boost

Sending the message that ATCA is alive and well, and that component vendors are ready for the processing-intensive demands that telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) and their service provider customers demand, RadiSys Corp. this week launched two new processor blades based on the standard for blade-based server architectures.

The Promentum ATCA-4310 is a 10gig single-slot processor blade designed for compute intensive applications where transaction and subscriber load can increase dramatically in short intervals, such as IMS, IPTV and wireless control plane-based applications. With the ability to support redundant 10GbE fabric connectivity to on-board dual-core processors, the ATCA-4310 provides designers with increased bandwidth and great performance per watt, making it a cost-effective carrier-grade solution that can be leveraged across multiple applications.

Also new is the Promentum ATCA-7220 Dual OCTEON PLUS Packet Processing Module, a high-density gigE blade – based on the Cavium Networks OCTEON Plus multi-core MIPS64 processor – for packet processing applications such as radio network Controllers, session border controller, security gateways, edge routers and media gateways. The blade’s architecture incorporates a 10gigE switch with content-aware capabilities, enabling offloading preprocessing from the Cavium Processors.
 
Todd Etchieson, vice president of communications networking product management at Radisys, said the company was first to market with 10gig ATCA more than a year ago, but this week’s news extends 10gigE beyond the back plane to the front panel, enabling TEMs and their carrier customers make better use of network resources.

And while some in the industry have put into question the future of ATCA, Etchieson said Radisys continues to see “strong demand and strong orders” for its solutions based on the standard.

Most of xchange’s sources indicate that it was HP’s statements criticizing ATCA as it moved away from that space that caused a misperception about ATCA. In announcing 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.

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

She said 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 added 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, said Martino. “The cost savings is incredible,” says HP’s Martino.

For more on the ATCA discussion, click here.

HP www.hp.com
Intel  www.intel.com
RadiSys Corp.http://www.radisys.com

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