Product category:
CompactPCI Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Kontron UK | Subject: AT8400
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 20 February 2006
Carrier launches new wave of AdvancedTCA
systems
The AT8400 is one of the world's first commercially available AdvancedTCA carrier board that supports up to four full-height, hot-swappable AdvancedMC modules.
New from Kontron at 3GSM, the AT8400 is one of the world's first commercially available AdvancedTCA carrier board that supports up to four full-height, hot-swappable AdvancedMC modules The AdvancedMC bays can be populated with a wide variety of field-replaceable modules, such as processor AMCs, storage AMCs and telecomms specific I/O-AMCs
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 30 Jun 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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With this flexibility, the AT8400 significantly simplifies and expands the design options available to telecom and network equipment manufacturers planning to design systems using open modular communications platforms.
"In today's competitive telecomms and datacomms market, versatility and upgradeability of systems and services are extremely important to operators and service providers", says Benoit Robert, Kontron Executive Director, Product Development.
"For these companies it is vital to react quickly to new market changes, and the AT8400 carrier board for AdvancedMCs delivers the kind versatility never before achieved in carrier-class systems".
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"This is all the more accentuated by the many advantages of AdvancedMC modules being the smallest field replaceable unit which reduces operating expenditures (OpEx) and integrates greater performance and functionality into a smaller footprint".
In order to support a wide range of hot-swappable AdvancedMC module configurations, the AT8400 board features an entire PCI-Express and a Gigabit Ethernet switching infrastructure, a SAS controller to support storage AdvancedMCs, as well as a redundant base interface, a dual redundant fabric interface, and a telco clock for each slot.
Fully hot-swappable, the AT8400 is suitable for dual-star and full-mesh configurations in 14- and 16-slot systems, and can be managed via SNMP, Telnet, CLI, either In-band or out-of-band via 10/100Base-T Ethernet or RS232.
With full IPMI 1.5 support, the AT8400 also features a dedicated microcontroller as an additional Firmware Update Manager (FWUM) for field upgrades, rollbacks and watchdog functions.
Telecomms and network equipment manufacturers who design various wireless or wireline network elements can now choose from several configurations of Kontron AdvancedTCA and AdvancedMC building blocks, fully integrated into a total open modular solution.
For example, a combo of one processor AMC, one storage AMC; one DSP AMC and one I/O AMC would be ideal for an IMS-based VoIP gateway with the OS on the processor and storage AMCs and DSP AMC to handle transcoding application.
Four processor AMCs could be used for an assortment of applications that require high processing performance on multiple independent processing nodes on one AdvancedTCA board.
Two processor AMCs and two storage AMCs could be used to power fully redundant database/storage applications.
A processor AMC with three storage AMCs could form a RAID 5 storage implementation using SAS AMCs (eg to store multimedia content such as streaming video).
Three I/O AMCs with one storage AMC driven by a CPU blade could be used as a general purpose I/O extension.
For service providers, there are numerous advantages to deploy services on open standard communications solutions using Kontron's AdvancedTCA and AdvancedMC building blocks.
Such benefits include improved flexibility and scalability of networks to "swap in - swap out" new and exciting services with no network down time and without the huge expense of forklift upgrades.
Likewise, network operators can dramatically reduce operating costs (OpEx) and shrink "real estate" requirements, making it considerably easier to maintain and co-ordinate inventories for greater economies of scale. Request a free brochure from Kontron UK ...
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