ATCA Blade Server is designed for the telecommunications sector

What is ADVANCEDTCA?

ADVANCEDTCA (ATCA) is an industry innovation program that will develop new blade server products and technical specifications for blade server chassis profiles for the telecommunications industry. ATCA is being developed by the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Association (PICMG) to meet the needs of a new generation of communications applications that COMPACTPCI or other proprietary solutions cannot meet.

Currently involved in the development of ATCA companies have reached more than 100. These companies include telecommunications equipment manufacturers, computer OEM vendors, application computing platform providers and Third-party hardware and software vendors. The PICMG Association has a total of more than 800 companies.

Planning goals

ATCA's main goal is to provide a standardized platform architecture for telecommunications-grade telecommunications applications, while supporting many telecommunications-level features such as nebs and 99.999% availability. Finally, this architecture provides a huge advantage for developers by providing more interoperability between the choices and components of multi-tier solutions tiering.

Expandable Backplane Environment

ATCA focus on the requirements of a new generation of communications equipment. This architecture optimizes the connectivity requirements of signaling and media gateways and provides a wide range of extended space for more high-performance computing components.

The backplane environment provided by ATCA can support:

§ A large number of standard and proprietary fabric interfaces § Powerful system management features § superior power and thermal performance

Complement Existing Solutions

ATCA will complement existing solutions, such as COMPACTPCI, by providing a higher level of performance and expansion capabilities. The migration of existing proprietary solutions to ATCA will benefit from its standardized features and out-of-the-Box build module solutions. This architecture also supports standard structural interfaces such as Ethernet and InfiniBand. In addition, it supports a variety of proprietary structures.

The backplane architecture supports both star-and full-mesh connectivity between motherboards in the system, and provides built-in IPMI 1.5 system management capabilities through the IPMB interface. The front-end and back-end cabling can support the standard 600 mm cabinet wiring method commonly used in central office equipment at present. A single slot for each motherboard in the ATCA can support up to 200W of power, and each motherboard's power supply is supplied through a redundant 48VDC.

Specification tiering and implementation time

The PICMG 3.x series will provide a large number of switching architectures in layered technical specifications, and these structures will continue to evolve with the development of structural technology. The following is the ADVANCEDTCA specification's plan for tiering and specific implementation time:

§PICMG 3.0 defines the core specifications of the architecture mechanism, power supply, system management, and structural connectors

§PICMG 3.1 Specification for Ethernet structure interconnection

§PICMG 3.2 Specification for InfiniBand structure interconnection

§PICMG 3.3 Specification for Starfabric interconnection

Specific implementation time

§ATCA specification Start-November 2001 13-14th

Final release time of the § specification-third quarter of 2002

PICMG's original intention was simply to expand the application of PCI in industrial automation, and has now developed into a leading provider of open building modular communications equipment such as COMPACTPCI.

Intel Corporation's ADVANCEDTCA product development work

Intel fully supports the development of ATCA as a key support technology for a modular network. We believe that ATCA will provide the required reliability, management capabilities, and performance to meet the need to create telecom-grade networking components based on open standards. ATCA will make the solution available:

§ High Availability

§ High Performance

Faster Time-to-market

A series of basic module solutions

Intel will provide TEM and OEM with a range of basic module solutions from chip to ATCA compliant subsystems. Not only can customers take advantage of this advantage, but they can also get an ecosystem of standards-based solution providers that quickly push them to market after designing highly available and high-performance processing applications.

Control Panel and Data board

Intel is currently developing ATCA products that support the dashboard and data boards, which are expected to be officially launched at the end of this year (2002) and early 2003.

• Server infrastructure/management-specific products will be launched in the second half of 2002.

• Access/EDGE-Intel will launch a series of packet-processing blades suitable for ATCA profiles in early 2003.

More choices and better interoperability

Intel is working with PICMG to help develop ATCA specifications. In addition, Intel plans to provide an ecosystem to support the timely listing of ATCA solution components and to enhance interoperability between components. For our customers, this means that many layers of the solution stack will have more choices and better component interoperability.