Upgrading AdvancedTCA Processor Blades for the 4G Market

By Keate Despain, RadiSys

Telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) must provide ever-increasing network bandwidth and faster application deployment within a constrained timeline. Their service provider customers are quickly moving to 10 GbE networks, raising demands on equipment such as media servers, 3G and LTE wireless infrastructure, and IP multimedia subsystems (IMS). These systems require high-performance computing blades that also minimize power consumption.

Developers have long made tradeoffs among performance, price, and time to market. In the past, higher performance meant higher cost and higher power consumption. Fortunately, new standard CPU technologies deliver the flexibility and performance developers need while reducing total cost per unit. Among the factors developers must consider are compute performance, overall cost, upgrade path, and thermal requirements. What they need is a price/performance optimized blade that meets TEM and service provider requirements such as easily dropping into an existing chassis, supporting multiple storage options, and enabling the move to virtualization in network elements.

The key is the utilization of processors such as the Intel® Xeon® 5500 series (Nehalem technology). In single-socket AdvancedTCA SBC designs, such devices offer higher performance while being fully upgradable for next generation performance, thus safeguarding hardware investments.

The Xeon 5500 consumes less power than its predecessors; therefore, blades based on it can be cooled in existing chassis while still providing much higher performance. However, the processor is only part of the package. New blades must also support multiple storage options, including SAS/SATA and solid state and USB flash drives, allowing TEMs to optimize systems for a combination of performance, flexibility, reliability, and cost. Another key feature is support for virtualization to utilize multicore technology, including I/0 virtualization, thus easing the porting of legacy application software and operating systems. For example, developers may capture software written for older RTOSes on virtual machines within a single-processor environment. 

An example new blade is the RadiSys Promentum ATCA-4500 based on the Intel Xeon 5500. It effectively doubles the number of transaction or subscriber units service providers can handle per slot, thus dramatically reducing cost per unit. It allows for up to 64G of memory through a massive VLP DIMM array, offers multiple storage options, uses the new Extensible Firmware Interface, and provides support for extended Intel Virtualization Technology. At the same time, it can still pass NEBS requirements and has been tested against CP-TA guidelines. It supports popular Linux platforms (including Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and is certified with VMware ESX 4.0. The Promentum ATCA-4500 is well-suited to demanding applications in LTE, WiMAX, and IMS deployments. 

The latest processors can handle 4G requirements since they provide much greater computing power within the thermal framework of their predecessors. Blades such as the ATCA-4500, based on such processors and taking advantages of advances in storage technology and virtualization, provide excellent solutions for current platforms. The result is greater performance per watt per dollar, just as service providers have demanded.

Keate Despain is Senior Director of Product Line Marketing at RadiSys. You may reach him at keate.despain@radisys.com.