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ATCA - That's Why |
| By Magnus Fritzson, Market Communcations Manager at Hectronic AB |
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Ten years ago the question was how to achieve availability levels high enough in data and telecom networks. The answer was proprietary solutions with operating systems, middleware standards and physical interfaces developed internally. Today the question is the same but the answer is often ATCA.
ATCA is a set of standards specified by PICMG in close cooperation with the telecom industry. ATCA lowers cost by enabling the use of standard off-the-shelf computer products and still maintain a 5-9 availability level.
– That means basically that the system is alive 99.999 percent of the time. Five nines is what they tend to call it, says Barry Buxton, Technical Manager at RadiSys.
ATCA products are almost exclusively used in telecom and datacom applications. On the other hand telecom and datacom are becoming an increasingly important part of applications in various parts of society and as part of systems in other market segments. Credit card payments need reliable data communication and the same can be said for air traffic control ensuring airplanes take off and land safely.
– Telecom is everywhere. It’s much more than just the phone that you pick up and make a call on, says Buxton. |
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Ensuring operator profits |
The demand for 5-9 availability is of course linked to company profits. A Network being down is a major loss of income to the operators. RadiSys often produces availability calculations based on the customers system architecure.
– In telecommunication 5-9 is normal. To achieve it though is not trivial. It’s not one standard thing. It’s a combination of hardware and software in the whole system architecture.
Redundancy is a key element in availability in an ATCA system. Typically there are two pieces of everything, two switch blades, two system managers and double communication paths to every slot. The shelf managers control the condition of the system and redirect data flows and reassigns tasks when needed either independently or under control of appropriate application middleware.
– The shelf managers are actually very intelligent devices. They keep track of each other such that system events are updated in both shelf managers. |
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Redundacy is a key element in establishing 5-9 availability in ATCA systems. There are two Shelf managers in a system, each Shelf manager with a possibility to take over monitoring and controlling of the system should the other shelf manager break down. |
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Should one shelf manager suffer from a failure the event history of the system is traceable in the other. Redundancy is there, not so that every part of the system always will work, but for the system as a whole not to break down.
– From an operator perspective a single element can probably fail but the service will continue uninterrupted.
I try to show off by asking if not two boards and software modules of the same kind stand the risk of having the same fault built into them. Barry Buxton isn’t shaking in his shoes.
– We haven’t found any instances where a failure in one module is automatically replicated in the other at the same time, says Buxton. |
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RAS – Reliability, Availability and Serviceability |
A common acronym in this context is RAS, Reliability, Availability and Serviceability. Availability has been discussed so far in the text.
Reliability is for instance about selecting components specified for harsh environmental conditions and designing for those applications. Dual data paths in the design of boards and multiple fans and power supplies are other examples of measures to increase reliability in an ATCA system.
When it comes to the “S” in RAS, serviceability, every part of the system is in-service hot swappable, meaning that it’s possible to switch parts like boards, fans and power supplies without powering down the chassis or, more importantly, disrupting the application.
ATCA saves money for telecom operators by prohibiting costly communication breakdowns. The possibility of an increased level of computing performance in one system is also a matter of lowering cost.
Barry Buxton compares CompactPCI with its system power consumption limited to 50 W with ATCA specified for up to 200 W. Some of the newest high-power processors cannot be used in CompactPCI due to lack of space and limited heat dissipation possibilities.
An actual customer case proved the point clearly. The customer was able to move from a CompactPCI solution with 8 processor boards to a one board ATCA system with one hyperthreading high performance processor.
– So although the initial price may be more the performance level is so much higher that you can typically consolidate your application into fewer blades or add significant performance increases. This then helps to reduce the overall total cost of ownership. |
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Drawing advantages from ATCA development |
MicroTCA is a complementary architecture to ATCA. MicroTCA re-uses the same Advanced Mezzanine technology developed for ATCA opening up a wider range of applications. AMC boards are used in a MicroTCA system without a bladed host, the boards side by side in the system. Such a system is typically less compute intensive, not as critical as the ATCA equivalent but still draws advantages from the ongoing development in PICMG standards.
According to Barry Buxton MicroTCA is starting to be used in applications today where earlier VME or CompactPCI formats were dominant. Typical MicroTCA applications include Wimax base stations and low density media gateways. |
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RadiSys offers the ATCA components to build an ATCA system. Hectronic is the distributor of RadiSys products in the Nordic region. For more information an technical specifications about the ATCA products offer, follow the links below to relevant RadiSys products on the Hectronic web site. ATCA system products » ATCA blades » AMC cards » |
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MicroTCA is currently growing and new standards are evolving in order to enable the use of MicroTCA in applications other than telecom. For instance we are seeing an increase of projects targeted at MicroTCA and ATCA in the Defence industry.
– As Systems Management in MicroTCA systems is compatible with the ATCA standard and AMC modules can be used in an ATCA or MicroTCA system this enables a seamless transition between ATCA and MicroTCA systems, says Buxton , allowing the customer to scale the application accordingly. |
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Growing from development of wireless technologies |
ATCA is growing worldwide. The development of new wireless technologies supports that growth. WiMAX is among the more interesting wireless technologies. Developing countries often find WiMAX the solution when the wired infrastructure is not present and too expensive to put in place.
– The constant evolution of wireless telecom is the biggest growth area, says Buxton but there are always new interesting application areas that ATCA is finding its way into.
A specific area interesting for ATCA based technology is in physics research. Particle accelerators have demands for high performance communication paths making ATCA an interesting technology to use. A current PICMG working group is evaluating the enhancements that need to be made to support this activity.
Data communication in railway infrastructure is a somewhat more down-to-earth application where ATCA is expected to take market share. There is also an uptake in Defense applications that specify ATCA infrastructure because of its reliability and bandwidth possibilities.
ATCA is definitely a maturing architecture with the widest industry acceptance in telecommunications and data communications. RadiSys supplies high performance blades and systems and in the integration of S/W middleware stacks into those platforms enables the users to concentrate on their unique value – the application. |
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| Barry Buxton is Technical Manager at RadiSys. |
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Facts about standards mentioned |
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VME
A standard initially released in the late 1980ies and is now managed by VITA, a non-profit organization of vendors and users. VME is a standard originally aimed at users of the Motorola 68000 processor. VME includes specifications for the backplane bus, board sizes, mechanicals and connectors.
Compact PCI
A PICMG standard ratified in the first version in the mid 1990ies. Unlike VME, daughter boards used in CompactPCI systems are also standardized, and are called PMCs, PCI Mezzanine Cards. Later, the CompactPCI backplane was extended with dual Ethernet, often called a fabric. This became the standard PICMG 2.16.
ATCA
A standard that evolved from CompactPCI PICMG 2.16 in the early years of 2000 introducing dual fabrics and a shelf manager to monitor and control the system. Boards connected to the ATCA backplane are called blades. First generation ATCA blades often supported PMCs but the current daughter board standard is AMC, Advanced Mezzanine Card. Contrary to PMCs, AMCs are hot pluggable and act more as logically independent entities.
MicroTCA
AMCs are often considered powerful enough for some applications and work rather independently. A MicroTCA system makes use of that and, compared to ATCA, has reduced host intelligence by combining ATCA backplane and shelf manager equivalent functionality on one board, the MicroTCA Carrier Hub, MCH. |
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