Appliance Deployment Featured Article

The service provider market is as competitive as an Olympic 100 meter dash. But instead of training, a healthy diet and some good genes, service providers live and die by the infrastructure that drives them.

UNICOM (News - Alert) Systems and its hardware partner Radisys know this as well as anyone. Not only have they teamed on selling service provider solutions, they recently teamed on a TMC (News - Alert) webinar, "System Architectures for Service Providers - Understanding the Technology and Opportunities."

In the webinar, the partners looked at “the key market trends and viable technologies that businesses should consider in order to maximize server performance, maintainability and interoperability,” they explained, with UNICON talking about ATCA, dense server architectures and network rack servers, and Radisys discussing building high-value systems based on this infrastructure.

Best Advice

When it comes to service provider system architectures, especially wireless infrastructure, there are a number of approaches – ATCA, High Density Servers, Network Appliance (News - Alert) Servers and Standard Rackmount Devices.

ATCA tends to hold sway in the high end, where it is based upon one industry standard, while the others can be based on a mix of standards. It is also very high density and has a five year-plus architectural design lifespan. This approach can handle high speed packet processing, has high availability and is purpose-built for telco infrastructure.

High Density Servers (HDS), meanwhile, are based on multiple standards and have only a 2-3 year architectural design lifespan.

Network Appliance Servers have less density that either ATC or HDS, but are good to set up in pre-existing communications environments. Standard Rackmount Servers are also best suited for low-density, pre-existing environments.

The two companies agree that customers should consider “density, serviceability, performance, cost, and lifecycle.”

Other Things to Consider:

• How much/what type of power is available?
• How many servers fit in a rack, and how many racks fit into the installation environment?
• Do you have to fit into multiple environments (power and size flexibility)?
• How is I/O connectivity provided?

Partnering Up

UNICOM Systems doesn’t just address service providers, but has software tools for large enterprises across the globe, including CICS Automation, System Performance, Application Modernization and more, the company reports.

Radisys, meanwhile, focuses largely on helping telecoms, as well as defense and aerospace shops with wireless infrastructure. Radisys provides partner UNICOM with ATCA network infrastructure components, upon which telcos can build and deliver applications.

Together, the two companies can deliver complete ATCA solutions.

“UNICOM Engineering understands the evolving infrastructure requirements for telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs), carriers and service providers. We design, integrate and test carrier-grade ATCA platforms, accelerate deployments and maximize ROI,” UNICOM said. “By partnering with industry leaders like Radisys, UNICOM Engineering is able to produce high-mix, COTS-based solutions that solve unique network requirements. Such partnerships can extend our solution capabilities so we can provide greater flexibility and deployment options not available from other vendors. And, this partnership helps our customers reduce research and development costs by bringing together the best-in-class skills and experience needed to deliver highly reliable carrier-grade systems.”

Radisys has been cited numerous times for its expertise, including a 2009 product of the year award from Unified Communications Magazine for the Voice Quality Enhancement (VQE) features of its Convedia Media Server. Just last month, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani interviewed Radisys’s Ray Adensamer (News - Alert) at TMC’s WebRTC conference.

To learn more, be sure to watch the full webinar on TMCnet.