Telecom Platform Deployment Featured Article

Starting off with a definition of NEBS might be a good move here: It stands for Network Equipment Building Systems, a common set of safety, and other design industry guidelines applied to telecommunications equipment in the United States. Most equipment must be NEBS certified before it can be integrated into carrier facilities.

NEBS specifications deal with, among other issues, power management, electrical shielding, disaster preparation and hardware interfaces. Carrier Grade Servers are NEBS-3 and ETSI (News - Alert) compliant standard building blocks used in a variety of telecom applications, important for satisfying the requirements and limited space of the telecom central office.

NEBS-3 means “the equipment is in the network for the long haul,” according to the NEBS-FAQ.com site, a logical place to turn for such info: “We're talking about Carrier Class with this stringent level. The equipment will operate under the environmental extremes found in a central office. In a nutshell, the equipment meets all of the requirements” you could want it to meet.

So, that settled, Kontron offers a nice range of carrier grade servers adhering to NEBS.

The CG2100 Carrier Grade Server, for instance, is NEBS-3 and ETSI-compliant, with dual socket support for the Intel (News - Alert) Xeon processor 5600 series, coupling high performance with power efficiency to provide improved performance-per-watt over previous-generation rack-mount servers. It would be a choice for the demanding environment and limited space of the Telco central office, as well as for network data centers.

For telecom and network equipment vendors who seek to build a multicore network element that demands packet acceleration and expanded capacity through software, Kontron has partnered with Wind River (News - Alert) to introduce the CG2100 Network Acceleration Platform.

The Kontron CG2100 NAP comes prebuilt with control plane operating system support -- Wind River Linux -- according to company officials, who say the platform also includes hypervisor to load and configure individual cores and to provide abstraction of system resources.