Telco Systems at SUPERCOMM later this month will introduce the T6Pro multilayer, multiservice metro core routing switch. The T6Pro is important to the vendor and its customers, as well as the industry at large, because it’s the first product of its kind based on a new hardware platform specification called AdvancedTCA, says Zvi Marom, CEO of Telco Systems BATM.
AdvancedTCA, for which there will be a small pavilion on the SUPERCOMM show floor, is an effort to standardize hardware equipment across a variety of product categories to drive down product design and manufacturing costs of equipment; enable vendors to focus on developing valueadded software rather than baseline hardware;
and allow service providers to mix and match different vendors’ equipment — like putting one vendor’s blade in another vendor’s chassis. Of course, if AdvancedTCA takes off, it could reduce costs on wide variety of equipment for everyone from the equipment designer to the manufacturer to the service provider that buys the equipment.
The PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturing Group (PICMG), a group of more than 100 companies, is driving AdvancedTCA, which is a key initiative for Intel Corp., known as a force in driving innovation. Among the other vendors involved in AdvancedTCA through the PICMG are Wi-Fi vendor Aperto Networks Inc., embedded computing company Force Computers, Huawei Technologies Co., Lucent Technologies Inc., Microsoft Corp., Motorola Computers Group, NMS Communications, Nortel Networks, Nokia, Siemens AG ICN, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments and UTStarcom. But there are many other members of PICMG.
According to a report published in October of 2003 by RHK Inc., the AdvancedTCA effort includes chassis; backplanes; and a variety of server, network processing unit blades, digital signal processor and disk storage blades. “Assuming success, the market forecast for third-party commercial building blocks — including server blades, non-server blades and common equipment — grows from a negligible amount today to $3.7 billion in 2007,” according to the RHK report.
Meanwhile, In-Stat/MDR in a recent study says it expects that PICMG-based blade servers will grow to more than a $1 billion market by 2008, with wireless infrastructure and softswitches being the two key drivers.
While previous efforts in the communications industry aiming to standardize components have had limited success, RHK says the time may be right for this kind of activity given the extreme drive by high-tech equipment companies to be price-competitive, get products to market quickly and lower development costs. “Even large system vendors who could afford to maintain hardware development may prefer to shift their effort[s] towards software, perceived as giving better return on investment,” the RHK report notes.
