AdvancedTCA is rapidly becoming a platform of choice for next-generation wireless services and infrastructure, as demonstrated by many recent announcements from major telecom equipment manufacturers such as Hewlett Packard, NEC and Siemens. As the telecommunications industry transitions from proprietary to standards-based commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms, interoperability among various AdvancedTCA vendors’ solutions becomes critical.
Telecommunication equipment manufacturers (TEMs) and service providers are looking to the ecosystem of vendors to provide them with telecom building blocks that leverage standards to ensure interoperability among and between vendors’ products. PCI Industrial Manufacturers Group (PICMG), along with its members’ companies is addressing the requirement for interoperable AdvancedTCA products through standards engagements, ECO updates and interoperability events.
AdvancedTCA was developed out of the need to support a growing set of requirements by the telecom industry as TEMs and service providers shifted from proprietary platforms to more broadly available industry standards-based telecom building blocks. Existing proprietary architectures from single vendors were costly to purchase and maintain although they did a good job at meeting specifications for existing voice networks. Existing computing platforms were evolving slowly to support telecom requirements but were falling short of performance, flexibility, cost and operational expense expectations by the industry. These platforms partially filled the gap of telecom requirements but could not evolve fully to meet the changing needs of the industry.
AdvancedTCA was developed by the PICMG community out of a recognition that next-generation standards and products must evolve to meet these changing needs.
That development focused around several key ingredients. These included designing an architecture that could support reduced development time and cost through standard board sizes, platform management, interconnects and hardware interfaces. Another architectural goal was the reduction in the total cost of ownership of a platform in operation. These requirements were met through the standardization of requirements such as NEBs Level 3 adoption, carrier-grade Linux for platform operating systems, testing to five-9’s reliability, and interoperability testing among complementary and competitive vendors.
Other aspects of the architecture which were designed in include scalable performance to meet the requirements of wired and wireless networks both at the core (e.g. RNC, xGSN platforms) and at the network edge (e.g., DSLAMs and NODE-B platforms). AdvancedTCA also supports a rich mix of silicon stretching from network processors to I/O components to digital signal processors to storage (internal/external), and of course general purpose processors.
Due to its broad standards scope, AdvancedTCA has been able to adopt parallel complementary specifications where applicable. These include IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), SAF (Service Availability Forum) hardware interface, multiprotocol support (TCP/IP, Advanced Switching, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, PCI-Express, etc.) and OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) and more. These standards help fulfill the mission of enabling vendors to create products with well known, well understood specifications, significantly shortening development time and integration time for TEMS and NEPs.
Flexibility was also built in to support new mezzanine architectures and products as they evolved. A case in point are new offerings for both the existing PMC (PCI Mezzanine Card) architecture on AdvancedTCA platforms and the new AMC (Advanced Mezzanine Card) architecture, which was designed specifically to enable greater scalability of AdvancedTCA platforms.
With new generations of higher performance silicon offerings coming to market each year, a mezzanine architecture was needed that could support these new offerings on AdvancedTCA. AMC’s expanded thermal envelope, larger surface area, management capability and standard interconnects offer scalable solutions with next-generation silicon on AdvancedTCA platforms. Lastly, AdvancedTCA was designed from the start to support five-9’s reliability through resiliency, redundancy, serviceability and manageability features.
Many factors still can influence the chances of success for AdvancedTCA (Figure 2), which is now two years old. Generally speaking, the telecom industry has accepted this new architecture, a fact that was underscored by more than 65 demonstrations at this year’s SUPERCOMM show in Chicago. There also have been numerous announcements by major network equipment providers indicating their desire to move to a COTS model and more quickly develop and deploy new telecom platforms from readily available off-the-shelf products.
AdvancedTCA was developed with the input of more than 100 companies within the PICMG group whose interests and telecom platform requirements were very broad. This diverse perspective has lead to the applicability of AdvancedTCA to a wide range of telecom applications, both in the core networks and at their edge.
Vendors need to make a variety of decisions that affect how they will bring standards-based products to market. These include deciding whether to make or buy their blades, how to differentiate their products successfully, and how to shorten time to market where build-to-order is required. Such factors are being addressed by the ecosystem and typically are worked out over time.
Several basic motivations are moving TEMs to COTS-based standard platforms, as indicated in Figure 3. NEPs and service providers want choice, scalability and flexibility in their platforms from hardware vendors. Proprietary platforms cannot provide this choice – while proprietary platforms often provide good solutions for one customer they often do not have the flexibility to accommodate multiple customers’ requirements.
As an open standard, AdvancedTCA has enabled a broad ecosystem of vendors whose products offer flexible options for NEPs to provide to their customers. Some examples include:
- The ability to support either PMC or AMC mezzanines
- Support for a variety of fabrics including Ethernet, the most popular fabric today
- Support of virtually any protocol, either natively or through protocol encapsulation within an AS (Advanced Switching) PCI-Express frame
Another vector supported within AdvancedTCA are the inherent efficiencies obtained with open standards platforms. The AdvancedTCA architecture has been highly optimized for both opex and capex reductions through such factors as high blade density, platform manageability, numerous chassis form factors targeting specific applications, mezzanine flexibility enabling highly dense computing and I/O solutions, internal and external storage solutions, and many other optimizations that drive lower cost metrics.
Since the inception of the AdvancedTCA architecture, the ecosystem of vendors has acknowledged the need to test for interoperability among vendors’ products. Although significant testing for functionality has occurred remotely, the majority of testing has been at AdvancedTCA Interoperability Workshops. To date, there have been nine of these workshops hosted by PICMG member companies who actively promote the AdvancedTCA architecture.
Over the last two years these workshops have evolved from testing mechanical fit and finish, board latches and connectors, to much more sophisticated challenges dealing with chassis backplane signal integrity testing, fabrics, protocol support, chassis management and so on. Steady progress has been made.
With the recent completion of AIW 9 in Boston came the inclusion of testing for the new AMC standard and implementations based on this new architecture. The AMC architecture already has proven to be popular with TEMs who are eager to broaden the capabilities of their mezzanine offerings but were previously limited by board space, thermal factors and platform management considerations. Overall, there has been significant and continued interest in continuing these events from the AdvancedTCA ecosystem, with several more on the planning horizon.
Because of the flexible nature of the AdvancedTCA specification, there is ample room for vendors to innovate on the AdvancedTCA architecture. However, this may lead to ambiguities in implementations and/or result in less then optimal experiences for system integrators. To enable the ecosystem to ease interoperability issues further, continued testing will be necessary at AIW events as well as within the PICMG organization. This should encourage members to create platforms that ensure some baseline minimal set of features which are always guaranteed to interoperate. Through “smart” configurations or automated platform detection, enhanced features can be enabled based on other capabilities found within an AdvancedTCA platform.
In addition, by working closely with vendors who actively support hardware and software standardized APIs from groups such as the SAF forum, Network Processor Forum, OSDL and others, significantly increased interoperability can be achieved among vendors’ product implementations.
The telecom world has changed significantly over the last three years, and the telecom industry through standards bodies has reacted positively to this change. Through the development of next-generation telecom architectures like AdvancedTCA and AMC, more vendors are fulfilling the requirements of service providers to adapt to the new business climate of shorter product development cycles, scalable performance, modularity, and high availability. 2005 looks to be an exciting year for AdvancedTCA and the many ecosystem vendors who supply next-generation platforms to this market segment.
Kirti Devi is Server Campaign Manager, Communication Infrastructure Group, Intel Corp. He can be reached at kirti.devi@intel.com. Jay Gilbert is Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Modular Hardware Platforms, CIG, Intel Corp. He can be reached at jay.gilbert@intel.com.
