Diversified Technology's New Blades

I’ve been following Diversified Technology, Inc. (DTI) of Ridgeland, Mississippi since their FTS900V Telco System appeared in 1995. (It was a vertical rack mountable, fault tolerant, IBM compatible computer chassis designed for installation in Telco rack mounting frames used in central offices.) Unlike California-based embedded hardware vendors, DTI has its main facility in the most picturesque countryside of Mississippi, not far from the great mansions built in the antebellum South.

At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose in April 2007, DTI demonstrated that the CompactPCI (cPCI) form factor has not entirely been eclipsed by the newer, heftier AdvancedTCA (ATCA). DTI unveiled a high performance, low power cPCI Blade based on the Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® Processors. Designed the CPB4712, it’s the latest and most powerful bade in DTI’s CompactPCI line, examples of which will soon be appearing in VoIP and media gateways to industrial environments and data control centers. Such a powerful cPCI blade means that DTI customers can now upgrade their existing installations rather than scramble to do a forklift upgrade and install ATCA equipment.

The CPB4712 features either the low voltage or ultra low voltage, high performance Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processors at speeds ranging from 1.67 GHz up to 2.16 GHz with 2 MB L2 cache. The blade is based on the Intel 3100 chipset with a 667 MHz front side bus. You can load up to 4 GB of memory on two PC-2700 SO-DIMMs. Also onboard are dual 100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports routed according to PICMG 2.16, one 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port available at the front panel, one PMC/XMC site (64-bit/133 MHz and x4 PCIe), High Speed USB, and a serial port. Single piece price is $1,795. Quantity discounts are available.

The appearance of the cPCI-based CPB4712 doesn’t mean that Diversified has forgotten about ATCA. Far from it. DTI recently introduced two new ATCA blades at the MVA conference in San Diego in February 2007.

DTI’s CPB4712 Dual-Core CompactPCI Blade.

First up is the ATS1936 Switch Blade, a low-cost 10 Gbps Ethernet switch. It naturally complies with PICMG 3.0 R2.0 ECN002 and PICMG 3.1 Option 1 and Option 9. The ATS1936 features three AMC sites for OA&M, firewall, and encryption applications. Interestingly, Diversified provides separate control and data planes by separating the Base and Fabric networks. The ATS1936 provides 1 Gbps Ethernet switching on the 3.0 Base Fabric and the 3.1 Expansion Fabric provides 1Gbps/10Gbps Ethernet switching. Both networks support Layer 2 switching as well as Layer 3 routing and IPV6. Single piece price: $5,245.

DTI’s other latest ATCA offering is the ATC6231, a dualcore Second Generation AMD Opteron™ processor-based Node Board for next-gen telecom apps such as wireless access/edge, telecom fiber transport, media gateways, softswitches, and Internet IP-based applications. The ATC6231 comes with the 2nd-Generation AMD Opteron processor Model 2210, with 2 MB L2 cache and support for up to 8 GB of memory per processor interface. It uses a high I/O bandwidth HyperTransport technology link interface, Broadcom HT2100 and HT1000 server-class chipset. There’s also a standard 2.5-inch SAS micro hard drive for storage, along with 10/100/1000Mbps dual port Ethernet controllers and one AMC.1 site for user configuration (connectivity to the AMC Site is x8 PCI-Express with Common Option to SAS drive and Ethernet). The board also features 16 MB of persistent through reset SRAM for error logging and redundancy. Single price is $4,645.

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.