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SCOPE Alliance Releases New Profiles, The SCOPE Alliance, an association of Network Equipment Providers (NEPs), reviews industry standards and open specifications to ensure their applicability to telecommunications systems. The objective is to identify subsets, called profiles, relevant to carrier-grade telecom platforms and to call attention to gaps, i.e., deficiencies that must be addressed to avoid implementation and interoperability problems. Thus, the SCOPE Alliance provides guidelines, narrows options, and prioritizes requirements to facilitate the creation of fully compliant, interoperable telecommunication systems. The SCOPE Alliance recently released profiles for the MicroTCA™ and AdvancedMC™ hardware platforms and for Long Life Cycle Support. This article presents high-level descriptions of them. More details are on the SCOPE Alliance Web site. MicroTCA Profile PICMG has defined MicroTCA, an open, standard hardware platform that offers a modular architecture for high performance, carrier-grade telecommunications systems. In particular, it describes shelves with up to 12 AdvancedMCs, along with a common fabric, and management, power, and cooling elements. It offers many configuration options, which makes the specification more versatile, but compromises interoperability and the ability of the industry to achieve high sales volumes and low prices. The SCOPE MicroTCA Profile identifies features that are sufficient to address central office applications such as basestations, data elements, and media gateways. Thus, the Profile aims to drive the market toward fewer options, increase the sales volume of compliant elements, and reduce telecommunications system costs. The Profile also identifies 13 gaps in the specification. AdvancedMC Profile The AdvancedMC specification from PICMG defines mezzanine cards suited to modular, scalable platforms for telecommunications and other uses. The SCOPE Profile focuses on the use of AdvancedMC in central office applications. It details a subset of features that are sufficient to address most service, control and data needs. The Profile also identifies 13 gaps in the specification. Long Life Cycle Support Profile The SCOPE Long Life Cycle Support Profile presents common terminology and methods for the carrier-grade engineering qualification process to facilitate integration of components from different vendors. It focuses on central office systems, which often have a lifecycle of ten or more years, but is also relevant for data centers that include telecommunications applications such as VoIP. The Long Life Cycle Support Profile defines such procedures as installation, replacement, patch, repair, update, and upgrade. It distinguishes between Field Replaceable Units (FRUs) and Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs) and between hot swap and hot pluggable FRUs and CRUs. The Profile defines maintenance, including corrective and preventive maintenance, as well as backward compatibility, including binary and source code backward compatibility. It also distinguishes between different kinds of software releases (such as base, major, minor, and emergency). The long lifecycle of telecommunications systems requires extended support and special agreements between the application providers and the suppliers of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Effective long lifecycle support is essential to telecom carrier-grade platforms. Paul Steinberg is the Chairman of the SCOPE Alliance. You can reach him via Lori Zielinski at lzielinski@nereus-worldwide.com. |