Huawei Outlines the Future of ATCA

   
Caroline Gabriel reports to telecomasia on the success of the ATCA platforms with major TEMs - Huawei and Nokia Siemens Networks 

"Huawei operates in this market both as a user of ATCA in its equipment platforms and as a maker of the boards themselves – it has designed 70 products based on the standard and sold 3,500 such systems to date. .. Most importantly, the servers will need to be both powerful and standards-based, which means extending the ATCA chassis standard to higher end infrastructure, according to Huawei. The next generation system will need to support data rates of between 200Gbps and 400Gbps by 2015, believes the Chinese giant, whose senior product manager Staffan Skogby (top picture) set out the vision at the recent Advanced TCA Summit.

"This will require boards which are twice the size of current products to handle between 500 and 1,000 Watts, and likely to require liquid cooling, a major investment .. Huawei has created a concept design for a new wave ATCA-based system and is in the process of gathering industry support prior to proposing it to relevant standards bodies such as the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), which defines the ATCA specifications".

Simon Stanley (pictured), Analyst at Large, Heavy Reading says: “All the leading telecom equipment providers now use ATCA, which is the only standardized platform specifically designed for large, high availability systems .. Most LTE trials and demonstrations use ATCA-based equipment. A number of Tier one telecom equipment providers are using ATCA-based platforms for LTE control and user plane functions. ATCA is also being used for 3G/4G integration: By using ATCA as a common plat-form for several generations of wireless technology, equipment vendors can offer flexible and integrated systems for 3G and LTE”

See "Huawei pushes ATCA for LTE boom" - here.

See more about vendors using ATCA: Allot & Procera, Radware, NSN, Alcatel-Lucent , Genband and "How to Build DPI Products? (Part II - System Design)" - here.