HP ADVANCES OPEN STANDARDS WITH ATCA PLATFORM LAUNCH

Hewlett-Packard launched its Advanced Open Telecom Platform last week and declared itself ready to help network equipment manufacturers usher in the long-awaited era of open architectures.

While that era will be slow in developing — still only 15% of total capex by 2008, according to Instat-MDR — HP's platform availability, in addition to recent announcements by Motorola and Sun Microsystems committing to Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard architectures, sets the process in motion.

“We are making the promise of putting commercial IT into the heart of the call path a reality,” said Joy King, director of network and service provider solutions at HP.

The AOTP is a comprehensive framework comprised of hardware built on the blade-oriented ATCA standard, software such as HP OpenCall and OpenView and other Service Availability Forum-compliant management software and services.

AOTP is supported by a portfolio of operating systems, including carrier-grade Linux. It also includes platform testing and validation, consulting and integration services, global sales, customer support and a partner ecosystem.

It's HP's solution to moving carriers and equipment makers away from proprietary infrastructures, while realizing the server community's dream of bridging the enterprise and telecom computing and switching environments with more efficient, open, interchangeable architectures.

“We believe ATCA is the architecture we need to base our future offerings on, but we are bringing to bear all the resources of HP beyond the server components,” King said.

As part of AOTP, HP also is planning a new blade server based on Intel processor-based AdvancedTCA. The blade server will be available in early 2005. The AOTP will feature what HP says is the first deployment of Intel's 64-bit Itanium processors.

Intel has been a major driver of ATCA, but it also supports companies such as IBM in their non-ATCA solutions. Sun Microsystems announced its ATCA plans a few weeks ago. IBM has gone its own way in developing an open blade-oriented telecom platform called BladeCenter T, an enhanced version of its enterprise oriented BladeCenter platform, which will be available early next year.

“To me, that was a big surprise,” King said. “Our [equipment manufacturer] customers tell us they do not see the opportunity to put standard enterprise BladeCenter offerings into the carrier network. Many support ATCA and say an architecture designed for the carrier environment is required.”

IBM responded that not only is its BladeCenter T platform built for a carrier environment, it's currently “in market” with equipment developed by French equipment maker Cirpack. Also, Motorola, which said in August it would incorporate HP's ATCA components in its iDEN and CDMA products, announced in June its collaboration with IBM on BladeCenter T.

“Companies like Motorola will be using more than ATCA to satisfy the needs of its customers,” said Jim Pertzborn, vice president of telecommunications industry for IBM.

Pertzborn acknowledged that ATCA was a good fit for certain aspects of the network, such as the transport plane, because it is very I/O intensive, but he also said IBM is targeting the control and service planes.

“We don't believe one size fits all,” Pertzborn said “The control plane and service plane is very compute-intensive, especially for the IP telephony applications around VoIP and IP-TV, and that's where we have targeting our BladeCenter T offering.”

The BladeCenter T is a solid product, said InStat-MDR analyst Eric Mantion. “There are very few things IBM produces that, on an engineering level, are anything less than stellar. They just sometimes lack strategy in getting to market,” Mantion said.

Mantion also said that there is room in the market for different architectures but that change would come slowly in both directions. “Nobody should expect all of the telecom gear to go to ATCA in four years,” he said.

The ATCA market will be worth about $15 billion in 2008, Mantion said. “It's billions, but it's still only a fraction of the overall market for capex,” he said.

With its announcement, HP said the barriers to migrating to open platforms have been removed. Wholesale swapouts will never happen, King said, but carriers need to move away from the high cost of proprietary platforms.

“They are not at a point now — and never will be — to carry the cost inherent in proprietary platforms,” King said.

Mantion said it also is time for the network equipment manufacturers to standardize, and unlike the PC market, standardization won't hurt them. “The NEMs lose absolutely no competitive advantage by going to a physical and electrical standardized platform,” he said.

They also gain by employing the open source operating system of carrier-grade Linux. HP is offering both standard Red Hat implementations of Linux as well as offerings from Debian. “With Red Hat, I'm sometimes less than excited about putting all of our enhancements in, so we chose Debian for the flexibility to add the features we need,” King said.

HP, like other Linux users, puts all development on Linux back into the open source community.

ATCA is getting converts all over the world, including Asia. Deloitte Consulting recently issued a report on China's influence in advancing certain standards in several areas of the industry just through their sheer numbers. ATCA is among the standards Chinese companies have adopted, but they often tweak them for their unique requirements.

“China has a strong lead in manufacturing in general,” said Igal Brightman, global market partner for Deloitte. “But as for being innovative, there isn't much they have invented.”

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