Vendors Move to ATCA

One of the fastest-moving migrations spotlighted at SUPERCOMM 2005, perhaps quicker than the move to VoIP, is the migration from proprietary telecom hardware to standard computing platforms, specifically ATCA, or Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture.

These industrial strength computing platforms are built on the CompactPCI form factor, but with much faster interfaces, and usually run on the Linux operating system. Vendors offering ATCA products differentiate themselves with software rather than hardware.

The ATCA platform is a specification of PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), an organization of more than 600 companies that also developed the CompactPCI standard. ATCA uses a blade-and-chassis configuration, like CompactPCI, but provides much faster communication between blades in a system and much higher performance overall.

ATCA now also has the blessing of influential standards organizations, such as the Service Availability Forum, which has created specifications for high-availability hardware and software for telecom. These specs use ATCA and the Linux operating system as their base.

"Vendors are asking for [the SA specification], and service providers are putting it in their RFPs," says Henry Turko, marketing chair of the forum and director of business development at Nokia Networks, a division of Nokia Inc. Companies do not want to have to develop proprietary operating systems, proprietary hardware and proprietary software. "They need hardware that is highly available, inexpensive, easy to maintain, easy to operate," Turko says. "They want to add value on top and not invest in the base platform."

NexTone Communications Inc. is one of the many vendors going this route. The vendor of session border controllers and softswitches is, in fact, most importantly a company with advanced session management software. NexTone already has implemented its session border controller software on IBM Corp.'s BladeServer hardware with the carrier-grade Linux operating system, a platform that is also open and standard, and is looking toward an ATCA version.

As such open platforms become widely used for many functions, and add blades for widely used functions, such as routers and gateways, "it gives us the ability to embed our intelligence in a wide variety of platforms, even routers," says Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing at NexTone. In an ATCA platform, one blade could be a router and another could run NexTone software, "and then you would have a session-aware router," says Dearing. As more and more hosted applications and services are added to a network, "you have contention for resources in the network, and now you have a way, on a session-by-session basis, to reallocate resources to give the necessary quality of service and policies for that user."

Performance Technologies Inc., a manufacturer of OEM products and subsystems, introduced its first ATCA products at SUPERCOMM. Using a 14U chassis with 14 slots as its basis, the company offered three new products: a 24-port gigabit Ethernet switch; a shelf-manager mezzanine board, using the same software as its CompactPCI products; and the new SEGway 4300 signaling gateway with 96 SS7 links to support up to 22,000 message signal units (MSUs) per second. (The number of simultaneous calls varies depending on whether they are VoIP or TDM, with VoIP calls taking more MSUs per call.)

Tony Romero, product marketing manager at Performance Technologies, says the three boards provide "all the basic elements for an ATCA platform." A service provider "could add a media-gateway blade or a session border controller or a media server or storage," depending on what service it was going to offer.

The ATCA platform may open new competitive opportunities for the company. Although Performance Technologies historically has sold to small carriers and to OEM customers, "such as a vendor that wants to add a media gateway," says Romero, "this is a fairly large chassis so we may see more carriers looking at it as they provide more applications."

IP Unity, a vendor of media servers, announced it will migrate its specialized media-processing product for multimedia IP to the ATCA platform.

IP Unity is one of a handful of vendors, including Convedia Corp. and Brooktrout Inc. (through its Snowshore acquisition), offering media servers, which essentially provide computing resources for multimedia applications that use a great deal of media processing, such as voice recording, conferencing and IVR. IP Unity also provides some of the applications as part of the platform.

The company says it will move its Mereon 3.0 software to an ATCA platform by mid-2006 as part of its product road map to be compliant with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). This will enable IP Unity to support the delivery of applications across IP and TDM networks.

RadiSys Corp., a maker of board-level products for telecom, had several demonstrations at SUPERCOMM of how telecom systems that previously had been standalone systems could be migrated to ATCA blades. The various applications all run on the RadiSys Promentum SYS-6000, an ATCA platform for control-, management- and data-plane applications. The applications included wireless base station and radio network controller (BSC/RNC), media gateway, IMS, and management and billing servers. The company demonstrated an IMS SIP server, the RadiSys Promentum SYS-6000, on an ATCA blade.

Solid Information Technology, a developer of systems for managing data in telecom infrastructure, offered a replication system for ATCA platforms. "We allow a programmer to partition an application across various blades and automatically replicate data across blades, and across memory and disks. There is always two copies of the data," says Alain Couder, president and CEO, Solid. He adds that Sonim Technologies Inc. uses the product for its push-to-talk system.

Less Is More
The Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture is great for many telecom infrastructure scenarios, but not those with tight size and cost constraints. So, PICMG is working on "ATCA lite" with reduced size, cost and power requirements.

Known as MicroTCA, or µTCA, the new spec combines Advanced Mezzanine Card (AdvancedMC) modules in a 19-inch shelf or an 8-inch cube without the need for an ATCA or custom carrier. The system – a chassis, switching hub and shelf management controller – is expected to come in around $500, according to data from Artesyn Communication Products.

Artesyn's Stuart Jamieson is draft editor of the spec, which is expected to be ratified by the end of the year. The company's AdvancedMC modules were featured in the industry's first physical µTCA demonstration at SUPERCOMM 2005.

The µTCA form factor is suited to central office and outside plant applications like wireless base stations, next-generation DLCs, optical add/drop multiplexers and FTTC systems.

Artesyn says µTCA also might be attractive for enterprise applications, such as Ethernet hubs, workgroup routers and SAN storage boxes, or even consumer applications. The latter might include converged entertainment boxes incorporating features of game consoles, digital TV decoders and DVD players, for instance; home controllers for applications such as security, automation and meter reading; and modular home network hubs supporting DSL, cable, FTTP, Wi-Fi/WiMAX, Ethernet/wireless LAN, firewall, router, etc.

Motorola Inc., which also has been active in defining the standard, announced at SUPERCOMM it is planning to develop Open Application-Enabling Platforms based on µTCA and other open standards. "We see MicroTCA being used in telecom edge applications where small physical size and low entry cost are key requirements, such as WiMAX access points, DSLAMs and VoIP access gateways," says Shlomo Pri-Tal, CTO of embedded communications computing at Motorola. "It can also support a variety of applications in medical, industrial and defense segments."

Pri-Tal says by using the same AdvancedMC modules deployed on ATCA blades, products based on the µTCA standard can get to market quickly. "It also makes software migration between the two types of platform relatively easy, so software support for MicroTCA platforms will be available in a much shorter timescale," Pri-Tal says. "And, of course, reuse of existing hardware and software will improve cost efficiency through economies of scale."

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines