Intel’s new AdvancedTCA products bring high-availability to the masses

At Telecom World in Geneva this week, Intel introduced a new product line based on Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture and Intel processors that emphasize high-availability for extremely dense platforms.

The new products are part of Intel’s NetStructure family of products based on AdvancedTCA, which is a series of specifications developed by the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturing Group (PICMG), a consortium of approximately 600 companies that develop open specifications for high-performance telecommunications and industrial computing applications.

Intel’s NetStructure MPCHC0001 14U shelf is the first fully compliant AdvancedTCA chassis and has been prominent in the PICMIG workshops developing the specifications, said Rob Armstrong, product marketing manager at Intel. The chassis will support AdvancedTCA standard blades, operating systems and application interfaces.

The shelf also dissipates 200W of power per slot. "It’s not a slam dunk to deliver that," Armstrong said.

Intel also introduced the MPCMM0001 chassis management module, which provides a single point of administration for monitoring the chassis as well as other system components, and a single board computer called the MPCBL0001 that represents Intel’s first that is AdvancedTCA compliant. The board has dual Gigabit Ethernet support as well as optional dual Fibre Channel support.

"This is essentially high availability for the masses; it no longer has that cloak-and-dagger mystique," Armstrong said.

Intel’s other new board, the IXB 3G packet processing board, is also the first to be AdvancedTCA compliant. It is initially aimed at the 3G wireless radio network controller (RNC) market. It has ATM interface cards for Node B and other RNCs as well as radio network layer cards for hosting radio network protocols and encryption.

"These blades can be re-used across network elements so technicians don’t have to be trained on separate [technologies.] For service providers that is an extremely attractive proposition," said Alex Quach, marketing manger of modular platform programs at Intel.

NEC said this week that it has chosen Intel’s full suite of AdvancedTCA building block solutions for its core 3G platforms. It will use the platform for its SGSN/GGSN packet switched media gateways. NTT DoCoMo is currently evaluating the solution.

Quach said that NEC has seen a two-thirds reduction in overall time-to-market because of the transition to a standards-based platform. "These products are causing a fundamental shift in the telecom industry both in the supply chain and for service providers," he said.

The ability to reuse blades across elements, the reduced power consumption, lower support costs in maintaining a significantly reduced number of shelves and frames in the AdvancedTCA PICMG 3.1 architecture and lower training costs help define Intel’s lower opex argument, which some analysts have put at 25%, according to Intel.