On April 20, 2006, the "2006 PICMG/P.R.C Annual Meeting and ATCA/cPCI Technology Application Summit" organized by the PICMG/P.R.C branch of the China Computer Industry Association (CCIA) has just come to an end in Beijing. Immediately after that, on May 18th, "ATCA Architecture for Future Telecom" Summit Forum, which is organized by Communication World Magazine and co-organized by In-stat China, will bring together major telecom carriers, leading service providers and equipment vendors, as well as many platform providers, board vendors and chip vendors in the field of ATCA, to discuss ATCA and cPCI technology application. The forum will also bring together major domestic telecom operators, leading service providers and equipment vendors, as well as platform providers, board vendors and chip vendors from the ATCA field, to have an in-depth discussion on ATCA's market prospects and applications in the telecom industry.
Within a short period of one month, two high-profile industry summits, ATCA can be said to be hot. What is the reason that ATCA, a new technology that has just emerged in the past two years, has been able to gain such extensive and widespread attention in the telecom industry, perhaps we can find some answers from the following information:
-- ATCA has a wide range of applications in the telecom field, from terminal equipment to the access layer and aggregation layer, and even the core network, which can be effectively utilized;
-- ATCA systems are more efficient and effective in the telecom industry, and can be used in a variety of applications, from the terminal equipment to the access layer and aggregation layer to the core network.
-- ATCA systems will become the main foundation platform for NGNs that support both voice and data;
-- ATCA has been gradually accepted by the industry, and its large-scale penetration is not far away;
-- RHK Consulting expects the ATCA market to reach $3.7 billion in 2007, and Intel predicts that global ATCA sales will reach $7.9 billion in 2009. sales will reach $7.9 billion in 2009;
-- Surveys show that 90% of telecom equipment vendors are currently developing ATCA-based systems. Including Huawei, ZTE, Alcatel, Motorola, Force, Kontron, Portwell, ADLINK, RadiSys, etc. have introduced ATCA blade-based components, single boards, etc.
The development situation is promising
ATCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) standard is the advanced telecom computing platform, which is born from the new generation of mainstream industrial computing technology widely used in telecommunications, aerospace, industrial control, medical equipment, intelligent transportation, military equipment and other fields. --CompactPCI standard.
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Tim Kober, Director of Marketing for Intel's Modular Computing Platforms Division, said that the telecom industry is currently in a period of transition. Users want new services and are willing to pay for them, but they are increasingly focused on the true value of the service. Telecom operators and service providers have the opportunity to increase turnover and profitability, but must deliver new services quickly and cost-effectively, sometimes by upgrading equipment, but more often by deploying new equipment, which creates a multitude of challenges, including deploying equipment fast enough when the window of opportunity opens, controlling operating expenses while managing more and more complex equipment, and meeting the 99.999% reliability requirements. 99.999% reliability requirements, and reducing the cost of inventorying additional spare parts.
ATCA is specifically designed to meet these needs, with larger board sizes and effective heat dissipation to support higher computing power; multiple high-performance switching interconnects to deliver high data bandwidth and separation of control and data traffic; and the modularity and scalability of the ATCA platform to provide a direct upgrade path to the next-generation telecom network, featuring the five 9s of high reliability required at the operational level. The modularity and scalability of the ATCA platform provides a direct upgrade channel and facilitates business expansion. It is easy to understand why ATCA, as the PICMG standard, has been announced, after less than three years, has been transformed from a standard awareness stage to a stage accepted by most mainstream vendors.
According to Rittal's Electronic Business Unit Manager, Tao Li, there are already many telecom equipment manufacturers deploying devices based on the ATCA standard into existing networks, including in 3G networks. From the development of the international market, the large-scale commercialization of ATCA is not far away, and it is expected that 2007 to 2008 will be the large-scale procurement period of ATCA. In the domestic market, the situation is similar, the promotion and application of ATCA in China has been in the forefront of the world, over the past period of time, the entire domestic operators and equipment manufacturers of ATCA experiments and adoption of the growth of a rapid, to Rittal, for example, there are a lot of domestic customers have purchased Rittal's full set of ATCA chassis for the development and testing of their own ATCA system, is expected that the official commercial products will be launched soon. It is expected that formal commercial products will be launched soon.
As for the commercialization of ATCA in the most likely to take the lead in making breakthroughs in the field, Li Tao said, in recent years, the domestic broadband market is developing rapidly, similar to IPTV, such as the need for high-density, high-performance computing of a new generation of broadband applications, will be the first to obtain large-scale application of ATCA in the field of the development of the prospects are very promising.
Interoperability is a priority
However, as a new technology, there are some obstacles that need to be overcome for ATCA to gain market acceptance. First and foremost is the issue of interoperability.
The ATCA standard is composed of a core specification, PICMG 3.0, and a series of supporting specifications. Mechanical architecture, thermal management, power distribution, and system management are defined in the core specification, while the auxiliary specifications define a variety of switching interconnect technologies, including PICMG3.1 AdvancedTCA Ethernet, PICMG3.2 AdvancedTCA InfiniBand, PICMG3.3 AdvancedTCA PICMG3.2 AdvancedTCA InfiniBand, PICMG3.3 AdvancedTCA StarFabric, and PICMG3.4 AdvancedTCA for PCI Express. From the technical point of view of ATCA, the details of ATCA after 3.0 have been defined more and more clearly, and there are currently more than 200 vendors who are designing and producing products and related management software in all aspects of ATCA.
Tim Kober said that the ATCA standard has evolved significantly over the past two years and is being widely adopted by major communications equipment manufacturers and service providers. While the ATCA standard has taken its place in the industry, one of the obstacles to growing into a de facto standard has been the lack of consistent interoperability standards between building blocks designed and manufactured by different vendors. In order to achieve true interoperability, ATCA platform building block providers must work together to achieve interoperability on top of a set of standards. Only by working together and collaborating as an industry*** will communications equipment manufacturers realize tangible benefits, including predictable integration solutions, rapid time-to-market, lower integration costs, greater product choice and a more vibrant marketplace. Service providers can also benefit from this endeavor, not only through rapid gains from innovative services, but also through lower deployment costs, increased product choice, and improved network flexibility and scalability.
This issue has attracted the attention of leading companies in the ATCA space, including Motorola and Intel. According to Kenny Wong, general manager of Motorola's Embedded Communications Computing Division in Asia-Pacific, Motorola is working with Intel to establish a proof-of-concept network, and there is a lab in Beijing doing part of the work. Its main purpose is to promote the interoperability of ATCA and some software from the third party can be applied and optimized on the ATCA platform that follows the standard.
In addition to this, cooperation is also very important for the promotion of a new technology. Li Tao said, although in the long run, the application scope of ATCA is very broad, the market space is very large. But ATCA is still in its infancy, we are market initiators, not competitors, so cooperation is very important, should be *** with the commitment to cultivate the market, *** with the cake bigger.
MicroTCA: Leading ATCA into a New Era
In the current "2006 PICMG/P.R.C Annual Meeting and ATCA/cPCI Technology Application Summit", another focus that aroused extensive interest from the participants is MicroTCA.
AMC (Advanced Mezzanine Card) is a new generation of ATCA platform expansion module standard, which is used to replace the PMC/CMC defined by the IEEE in 1993, and can provide higher system density, expansion flexibility, and management functions than ATCA. The concept of MicroTCA is to plug the AMC module directly into a passive backplane that supports a variety of topologies, rather than any carrier board. It is based on the AMC standard with hot-swappable and advanced switching capabilities, and defines a modular, scalable computing platform that meets the needs of small form factor, low cost applications.
The finalization of the AMC and MicroTCA standards is arguably the most significant recent development in the ATCA platform, and MicroTCA has been widely viewed favorably since its introduction. Some experts commented that MicroTCA makes AdvancedTCA enter an unprecedented "all low era": lower power, lower price, smaller rack size, all are quite good "low indicators". MicroTCA can be used in wireless base stations, Wi-Fi/WiMax RF boxes, IMS, next-generation digital loop carriers, optical networking devices such as optical ADMs and MSPPs, and even miniaturized devices for enterprise-class networks, expanding the scope of ATCA applications.
Tim Kober commented that although the MicroTCA standard has not matured, it is too early to talk about large-scale promotion, and MicroTCA will encounter some challenges in the process of application, but MicroTCA as the improvement and development of ATCA, extends the life of ATCA technology, and extends a variety of new features that are difficult to realize with other standard technologies. It is believed that MicroTCA products will be used on a large scale in the future.