The team managing the Advanced Intelligent Networks (AIN) business unit at Siemens
Information and Communication Networks (ICN) in Boca Raton, Fla., crafted an ambitious
list of goals when it set out to offer FFP II, the next generation of its Fast Feature
Platform system for telecommunications customers. They wanted to have the ability to
create a constellation of services to be made available to customers, including a prepaid
phone platform, enhanced routing capability, and the option to take advantage of
opportunities in the Internet telephony market.
Siemens ICN (part of the Siemens AG global organization) had two top goals: (1)
Providing customers with a faster, more scalable product and (2) delivering a system that
would be more affordable for small carriers, and also be more affordable than a service
control point (SCP) solution. Their secondary objectives included offering a true
AIN-based prepaid phone card platform and creating a telephony services platform to
support less technical system operators.
In order to meet these goals, Siemens ICN carefully selected the product line-up,
anchored by the 64-bit SPARCengine Ultra AXmp motherboards, and Solaris 2.6 operating
environment (OE) from Sun Microsystems. The high performance AXi multiprocessing boards
with this OE provided a reliable and scalable technology. The boards also had the
capability of offering customers a large system with greater functionality in a much
smaller housing, plus an easily upgradable path from predecessor board products.
Speed, Reliability, and Scalability
According to Ray Shedden, manager of Siemens ICN’s AIN business unit, this hardware
and software delivered the speed, reliability, and scalability specified for the FFP II
system.
Shedden’s team of product line managers spearheaded the FFP II project.
“Customers are demanding higher speeds, and the AXi multiprocessing boards allow us
to go up to four 64-bit CPUs per computing element, from entry level all the way up to a
pretty mean machine,” Shedden said. That includes telecom systems ranging from a
desktop unit to switching systems that can fill up a 90,000-square-foot room.
For the FFP II, the greater functionality and the operating environment solution mean a
full palette of revenue-generating call features like call forwarding, call screening,
enhanced routing, and Internet phone control, in addition to the prepaid phone platform.
Furthermore, carriers can incorporate intelligent peripherals to implement custom
applications such as advanced interactive voice response (IVR), speech processing,
messaging, and fax. In addition, Siemens ICN’s telco customers now have the option to
combine and bridge enabling technologies such as Internet activation and control of FFP
services. They can also take advantage of voice over IP (VoIP), broadband, and wireless
opportunities.
An Integration Partner
To maximize its in-house production scheduling, Siemens chose to outsource the integration
of the FFP II system. Siemens teamed up with GTE’s Communication Systems Division
(CSD) in Taunton, Mass. “They had the credibility, experience, technical expertise,
and a good cost structure,” Shedden said. He stressed that one criterion was
GTE’s familiarity with integrating the AXi multiprocessing boards.
GTE’s CSD worked closely with Siemens to develop the FFP II. GTE brought to the
project its extensive know-how in building anything from industrial-grade workstations to
Bellcore-compliant telco-grade switches.
For the project, GTE purchased the AXi multiprocessing boards and operating system and
incorporated various OEM and custom subsystems, including Bellcore-compliant RAID storage
systems and a custom environmental monitoring system, plus off-the-shelf RAM, to produce
the 19-inch-wide rack-mounted system. When used with RAID, each AXi multiprocessing board
can hold more than one quarter of a terabyte of memory.
Nine-Week Turnaround
“We did everything from designing a custom chassis for the AXi
multiprocessing boards and installing the operating environment to total system
integration of the rack to drop-shipping the final product to the end customer,”
recalls Chris Marzilli, director of GTE CSD’s Commercial Hardware Systems business
unit. The entire development process — from the day that GTE received Siemens’
RFQ to the day of the first delivery — took only about nine weeks.
“Selection of the elements going into the rack was critical,” Marzilli said.
Among the technical challenges were choosing a high-reliability -48V DC power supply
subsystem, customizing the environmental/event-monitoring capability, and developing a
remote power-cycling unit. Marzilli sees the high-compute performance (due in part to its
on-board cache memory) and scalability as the board’s two best features.
What direction will the future take? According to Shedden, Siemens ICN is straddling
the future, offering feature options for desktop workstations, CO switching, a wide range
of business functions, and the Internet.
Summing up the project’s success, Shedden emphasizes the contribution of the
underlying platform, “The ability of the AXi multiprocessing boards and the operating
environment to expand dramatically put us in the catbird seat. We have a proven,
bulletproof telephony platform, whether it be for narrowband, broadband, or a
voice-over-IP gateway.”
Stuart Taylor is product line manager, OEM Platforms Group, Sun Microsystems
Microelectronics. He is responsible for Sun’s UltraSPARC-based custom telecom
equipment solutions, including PCI and CompactPCI boards. For more information, please
visit their Web site at www.sun.com. |
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