3rd Annual ATCA Summit Winners

The Advanced Telecommunications Computer Architecture (known as AdvancedTCA or just ATCA) is a hefty computing form factor for work in telecom. The AdvancedTCA Summit Conference brings ATCA vendors together to display their wares to the world and each other. This third annual summit, as others before it, culminated in Best of Show Awards being announced and presented (Wednesday, October 17, 2007) on the Expo Hall floor at the Santa Clara Convention Center. A panel of industry experts selected products on the basis of criteria including distinctiveness of the product, central use of AdvancedTCA, and technical and business application of the product.

Best in Show winners included the following:

• The Motorola Centellis 2000 AdvancedTCA Communications Server. Compatible with Motorola's Centellis 3100 1 Gbps and 4100 10 Gbps application-ready platforms, the compact two-slot Centellis 2000 provides central office-friendly front-to-rear cooling, comes in AC or DC power variants and has a PICMG-compliant chassis. The unit is suitable for smaller deployments at both data centers and enterprise environments. Boards and software can be re-used by moving them from larger ATCA equipment to the Centellis 2000,so network equipment providers now have investment protection and can enjoy reduced time-to-market and development cost. Note: In September 2007, Emerson (http://www.emerson.com) acquired (for $350 million in cash) Motorola's Embedded Communications and Computing Group (previously called MCG, or Motorola Computer Group) in Tempe, Arizona. The transaction should be complete by end of 2007 and the Motorola division will transition to Emerson, with the Motorola staff remaining in Tempe.

• Intoto and Ixia's 16 Gbps iGateway Firewall. Intoto (http://www.intoto.com), a provider of security software for enterprise and carrier networking equipment and multi-service gateways, and Ixia (http://www.ixiacom.com), provider of performance test systems for IP-based infrastructure and services, jointly demonstrated how Intoto's iGateway Firewall can deliver up to 16 Gbps throughput on the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5300 series. The demo relied on Ixia's Optixia XM12 and IxLoad test application. The iGateway Firewall is a wide-ranging security solution that offers stateful packet inspection, content filtering, protection from internal and external attacks, traffic redirection, and simplified configuration management. It has a proprietary CyberDefense Engine that protects internal and DMZ networks. The iGateway Firewall provides protection from Denial of service (DoS) attacks such as SYN flooding, IP smurfing, LAND, ping of Death and all reassembly attacks. It performs NAT (basic, enhanced, service, reverse and 40+ Application Level Gateways), enabling users to connect multiple computers to the Internet and provides port forwarding to run servers (web server, mail server etc.) behind the firewall. The iGateway Firewall's is highly scalable and offers near linear performance scaling with the number of cores in the system. The iGateway architecture is designed to deliver optimum packet throughput and connection rate performance.

• Astute Networks' Caspian 10Gb iSCSI ATCA Storage Blade. Astute Networks (http://www.astutenetworks.com), a major developer of high performance networked storage solutions for mission-critical applications, received the Best Newcomer Product award for their Caspian storage blade, the first 10Gb iSCSI ATCA storage blade optimized for the telecom CO and MSC environments. The blade combines the performance advantages of Fibre Channel rackmount storage with the density and deployment advantages of ATCA. By reducing the footprint of external storage in ATCA systems, revenue increases per telco frame can be achieved because of a net increase in server blades per frame. Moreover, equipment acquisition and deployment costs are significantly reduced by eliminating expensive HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) and cables required to connect external storage. Astute's pioneering design enables telecom carriers and NEPs (Network Equipment Providers) to realize the full benefit of migrating from rackmount servers to blades.

• VirtualLogix' VirtualLogix VLX for Network Infrastructure 2.0. VirtualLogix (http://www.virtuallogix.com) specializes in Real-Time Virtualization™ technology for connected devices; their VirtualLogix VLX enables multiple operating system environments to run concurrently on shared hardware and provides a range of performance, fault tolerance and security options to address specific market needs. The Summit panel awarded VirtualLogix VLX for Network Infrastructure 2.0 the first-ever Best of Show Award in the category of Best Software Product. By the end of 2007, IDC predicts half of the NEP community will have adopted ATCA, and they anticipate more than 900% growth in ATCA adoption by 2011. VirtualLogix VLX for Network Infrastructure version 2.0 delivers support for the most advanced ATCA processor blades or AdvancedMC (AMC) processor modules equipped with Intel dual-core processors. The product also enables support of multiple heterogeneous operating systems onto a shared ATCA processor blade with no porting effort, allowing users to run commercial or proprietary RTOS and Linux simultaneously, resulting in optimized performance and lowered power consumption.

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

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