For anyone not familiar with the AdvancedTCA (ATCA) standard, RadiSys’ whitepaper, “ATCA: A Practical Perspective” is an excellent, and very readable, starting point. The company’s CTO, George Shenoda, clearly explains ATCA’s capabilities and advantages.

 

Approachable as the whitepaper is, however, perhaps you don’t have time to read seven pages of information. This article presents an executive summary of the whitepaper to get you started in less time.

 

 

Shenoda defines ATCA as “a new system form factor defined by the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group (PICMG (News - Alert)) to provide an industry standard platform that enables building telecommunication grade products in a multi-vendor compatible environment.”

 

Wow, that’s a mouthful! To put it more simply, the ATCA standard specifies all the key requirements for building open, modular communications systems. Specifications in the standard include chassis dimensions, backplane properties, module size and backplane interface specifications, and power rating.

 

The main objective of the ATCA standard is to enable the creation of computing and communications system products capable of being used for a variety of applications.

 

Specifically, ATCA “is aimed at converging telecom access and edge equipment functions with data center and storage equipment functions in a modular fashion,” Shenoda explains in the whitepaper.

 

 

Shenoda lists the following as being ATCA’s main attributes: 

 

The ATCA platform supports many different types of products, functioning to serve various applications—the building blocks of a computing or communications system.

 

In the whitepaper, Shenoda lists the following products as examples of products supported by the ATCA platform standard.

 

Blade Servers – These have applications including softswitches, Home Location Registers, Service Control Points, network management/Operations Support Systems, and data center processing.

 

Serving GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) Support Nodes – Known for short as SGSNs, these are mobile wireless network elements used for data communications functions.

 

Media Gateways – These are mostly used for service provider and enterprise networking applications.

 

 

According to Shenoda, “The technical benefits ATCA provides, from scalability to high availability to versatility and flexibility, translate into the ability to build more products and consequently provide improved services faster and at a lower cost.”

 

AdvancedTCA also provides the following advantages: 

 

To learn more about ATCA, download the full whitepaper from RadiSys here. Also, be sure to pay a visit to the company’s channels on TMCnet, AdvancedTCA and ATCA, and RadiSys’ website.