You might be ready for 2010, but if you’re a service provider, is your architecture ready for 2011 and beyond?

 

Service providers and OEMs need to ask themselves this question, in choosing best equipment possible to prepare for the next generation of high-bandwidth applications, Jeff Hudgins, vice president of engineering for Canton, Mass.-based NEI, Inc., told TMCnet during a recent podcast interview.

 

One option is NEI’s NEBS Level 3 certified A-13000 platform, a carrier-grade ATCA platform that offer customers a standardized architecture for next-generation communications applications.

 

“A couple of things we see in this area [include] need for maximum flexibility of the platform,” Hudgins told TMCnet. “One of the things that NEI’s been able to accomplish in this platform is multi-vendor solution where we actually have completed full validation and certification with six different vendors inside of a single ATCA platform. That’s the most that is available in the market that has actually gone through this level of rigorous testing. And by completing the NEBS testing, it really is a great proof point of a multi-vendor solution that’s running in an open standards environment.”

 

During the podcast, Hudgins also told TMCnet that, when picking a next-generation platform, the most important consideration is the environment the product is going into and “whether product requirements are for NEBS Level 3 or if it’s going into a data-center environment where size, spacing and power [are important].”  

 

Another factor to consider is what the application will need from a processing-power standpoint. Hudgins said OEMs and service providers need to take into account what the cooling and power consumption is going to look like.

 

“There are a lot of green initiatives out there and we’re seeing a lot of demand out there in terms of power and consumption,” Hudgins told TMCnet. “In some military applications, we’ve even seen where this has translated to where the actual gas consumed on a deployed ship becomes very important.”