Paul Tingey

Evolving Architecture Standards race on

On Wednesday of last week I had the chance to present at the Evolving Architecture Standards Conference in the UK. The event was focused on the ATCA, AMC and MicroTCA standards and gave delegates the chance to learn more about the evolution, capabilities and potential uses of these technologies.

Apart from presentations from representatives of Intel, Motorola, PICMG, Schroff and myself from Wind River, delegates also had the chance to take part in hands-on and tutorials lessons from Intel, Schroff and Wind River. There was also a day long exhibition featuring about 15 companies offering ATCA and MicroTCA related products.

Having spent some time talking to both delegates and exhibitors, there seems to be general agreement that ATCA based products are now emerging from the early adopter stage and gaining widespread support in the marketplace. The transition from innovation to adopted technology has been somewhat longer than some would have expected; maybe two years or more.

However, the consensus of opinion seems to be that MicroTCA will gain wide acceptance within a significantly shorter period of time. It is helped by the fact that the underlying technology (AMC) is well tested and readily available. MicroTCA will also benefit from a wider customer base across differing market sectors as evidenced by the wide range of registrants for last weeks conference who included representatives from industries such as Defense, Scientific research, Networking, Test Equipment and Industrial control.

The event was held at the excellent Williams F1 Conference Centre in Grove near Oxford and, at the end of the day, delegates had a chance to tour the Williams F1 Collection of more than 40 Formula One cars from past and present. If you are a Formula One fan like myself then this is one conference centre where it's definitely worth carrying a camera !

Telecoms equipment can be cool (honestly)

Many years ago, at a previous company, I spent my days writing assembler code for the 68302 processor and watched enviously as other (more fortunate) engineers wrote "modern" C++ applications for Pentium-II desktop PCs. In the canteen at lunchtime, no-one wanted to listen to my witty anecdotes about humorous 68K register names. At a technology level, embedded systems just weren't "cool".

However, times are changing. Desktop PCs may now offer dual core processors but, in reality, todays technology revolution is driven by a telecoms infrastructure that enables rich applications based on VoIP, Multimedia services and mobile communications. On the back of this revolution, the technology inside telecoms infrastructure equipment is getting pretty cool.

Wind River today announced Carrier Grade Linux support for the Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC T1 processor, a device which can include up to eight cores (that's at least four times as many cores as are in a desktop machine) and offers a glimpse into the future of network equipment.

So what's so cool about this device? Well, until recently each blade in a chassis based telecoms system had a distinct purpose; there were blades for the application plane, blades for the control plane and blades for the data plane. However, Sun's latest CP3060 ATCA blade, running an UltraSPARC T1 multi-core processor, is capable of performing all of these multiple roles simultaneously.

The UltraSPARC T1 processor, which includes up to eight individual cores each of which runs four threads, does this by offering it's resources as (up to) 32 virtual processors. So an ATCA chassis populated with a number of Sun CP3060 blades could offer hundreds of virtual processors each of which can be allocated to either application plane, control plane or data plane processing. This offers the possibility of consolidating several blades into a single slot and therefore reducing the size of the overall system.

The performance of the UltraSPARC T1 [Wikipedia reference] is impressive too. The device uses hardware multi-threading to minimize idle time in each core which in turn increases performance per watt. That means that the UltraSPARC T1 processor only requires about 35% of the power budget of an ATCA slot meaning that it runs cooler and it leaves more of the power budget available for other features such as increased memory. What you end with is increased processing power for the same power budget.

Crucially, this improved power efficiency leads to a reduced power/cooling requirement for the same processing power. In fact, for this reason the UltraSPARC T1 has already won an award for being the Worlds First Eco-Responsible Processor. Any technology which attempts to bridge the gap between our hunger for technology and our need to cut energy consumption is to be welcomed.

The kind of flexibility offered by the UltraSPARC T1 processor will be crucial as the IP Multimedia Subsystem or IMS (a topic which I'll cover over the coming weeks) begins to roll out. As well as the core benefits offered by ATCA and a CGL compliant operating system (high-availability, manageability, etc), IMS also demands exactly the kind of high performance and scalability which the UltraSPARC T1 processor offers.

Despite what you may think, telecoms infrastructure equipment can be quite cool...

Is standard based telecom equipment coming of age?

At the beginning of each day I try to spend a little time reading press releases and news items from the various industry sectors I take an interest in. As I read I often find individual items which catch my eye and make me explore a little deeper but, over the last few days, something else became apparent to me. What struck me was the number of news items related to AdvancedTCA and telecoms equipment which reported on the creation of partnerships and/or alliances.

So what does this indicate? Well, I feel that what we are seeing is a solidifying of the ecosystem around telecoms solutions based on industry standards such as AdvancedTCA and Carrier Grade Linux.

Take for example these news items over the last couple of weeks:

• Wind River Partners with Kontron to Develop Linux Based Industry Standard Telecom Solutions
• Performance Technologies and GoAhead Team to Offer High Availability AdvancedTCA® and CompactPCI® Platforms
• OpenClovis and RadiSys Partner to Deliver Pre-Integrated, High Availability ATCA Solutions for Telecom Equipment Manufacturers

These announcements indicate to me that AdvancedTCA and it's associated technologies are coming of age. Vendors, who independently offer component technologies such as hardware, high-availability middleware, operating systems and tools, are working together to offer "solutions" to their customers. An abundance of these cross-vendor solutions is, for me, a good sign of a vibrant ecosystem.

Each of the vendor companies involved is unlikely to succeed in the marketplace in isolation but, by interacting with each other in the ecosystem, they increase their chances of success in what is a dynamic and complex environment. Furthermore the environment itself (in this case, the market for telecoms equipment based on industry standards) is stabilized and strengthened once a strong and stable ecosystem of vendors has formed.

Companies who embrace the Device Software Optimization methodology understand the importance of a burgeoning ecosystem and open standards. I believe that these newly emerging partnerships in the telecoms equipment market will resonate with those companies and the pace of acceptance of AdvancedTCA and it's associated technologies will accelerate as a result. For that reason, we should probably expect more of this kind of announcement over the coming weeks and months.

ATCA stars in its own show

This week sees the AdvancedTCA Summit 2006 in full swing in Santa Clara. This gathering of over 100 companies and consortia who sponsor, use or develop equipment based on the ATCA (and associated) specifications is proof that ATCA is now a "force to be reckoned with". Let's face it, it's not often that a hardware standard gets its own show, let alone a summit.

ATCA's strengths are many and varied but its success has mainly been driven by its flexibility and interoperability. To understand more let's take a whirlwind tour through its history....

Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (better known as AdvancedTCA or ATCA) is an open specification developed by the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group (PICMG) to be a successor to its earlier CompactPCI specification. It first appeared in 2003 and included several features which made it ideal for high density, packet-based telecoms infrastructure equipment. Those features, amongst other, include:

• large form factor
• hot swap support
• high power capability
• backplane support for multiple fabric technologies
• IPMI management support

A couple of years later PICMG introduced a standard for a mezzanine card for use in ATCA systems. The new standard, known as Advanced Mezzanine Card (or AdvancedMC or AMC), extends the flexibility of ATCA by allowing AMC modules to be plugged onto ATCA cards. Crucially, AMC modules are themselves, hot-swappable. This means that an ATCA based platform which incorporates AMC modules is highly versatile and scalable to a very fine degree whilst also being highly-available in the carrier grade sense (i.e. 99.999% availability).

But the story doesn't stop there....

While ATCA provides an ideal open architecture platform for packet based telecoms equipment in the edge or core networks (i.e. deep in the core of the mobile or IP network), it's often too large and costly for equipment in the access network (i.e. the parts of a network which connect consumers with the mobile or IP network). For this reason PICMG have recently ratified a new standard called MicroTCA (also known as MTCA or uTCA) which is more suited for the access network in devices such as IP-PBXs, WiMAX access points and DSLAMs. The clever bit is that, while MicroTCA is a chassis solution which is physically smaller than an ATCA chassis, it still uses AMCs as its basic building block. Since AMCs can include the same base features as ATCA cards (such as hot-swap capability and system management) they, together with MicroTCA, provide a way for system designers to create physically smaller but still very powerful and flexible carrier grade telecoms equipment.

Expect to see and hear much more about ATCA, AMC and MicroTCA over the next few months. I fully expect these technologies to migrate into new markets areas (such as industrial control and medical equipment) as the standards mature and hardware vendors develop their product portfolios. We will also see a growth in the use of these open architecture hardware platforms in the telecoms industry itself as Telecom Equipment Manufacturers adopt them (as well as other open standards such as Carrier Grade Linux) to benefit from the advantages they provide (such as reduced risk, reduced cost and faster time-to-market). Indeed, market analysts have predicted a multi-billion dollar ATCA market over the next few years.

You can also expect to read more about ATCA and its "sister" standards on this blog over the next few weeks. I'll be highlighting ATCA (and MicroTCA) news as its released and I'll also be talking to ATCA vendors themselves to learn about their views on this exciting new technology.