In another sign that the once-hyped ATCA trend is sputtering, HP today announced a carrier-grade version of its BladeSystem blade server, replacing the ATCA-based product it has been selling for nearly two years.
“We’re moving away from ATCA,” said Christine Martino, vice president of telecom platforms for HP, which according to IDC is the leader in blade servers with 42.1 percent market share worldwide based on revenue. “We are now replacing our ATCA solution, which we had for a few years. We also have carrier-grade rack-mount solutions, which are still around.”
Martino said the ATCA market is becoming a component market, but that HP is a systems vendor, not a component vendor, so it chose to modify its existing commercial blade system for the telecom market.
She added that servers based on ATCA, a blade server standard focusing specifically on the telecom space, don’t offer the economies of scale you get from an architecture like BladeSystem, which applies to both enterprise or telco applications. “The cost savings is incredible,” she said.
ATCA also has been criticized for its limited power and performance. HP added that the ATCA chassis architecture doesn’t allow for memory modules to stand upright in their slots, thus limiting the density of the chassis as a whole.
Despite its shortcomings, research firm IDC recently released a study forecasting that ATCA is still poised for strong growth, reaching $5 billion in revenue by 2012, “despite being slowed by the mergers of four major [network equipment providers] and continued high prices.”
However, HP is not alone in moving away from ATCA. Motorola apparently abandoned the ATCA space in September when it sold off its Embedded Communications Computing business to Emerson. That same month Intel sold its ATCA assets to Radisys. And IBM Corp., another leading server vendor, recently told xchange it never adopted ATCA to begin with because of its obvious shortcomings.
As for HP’s new blade server, that is slated to be available in January.
It can be used by service providers and network equipment providers as the platform on which to build intelligent network (IN) and IMS elements, IPTV solutions, media servers, messaging infrastructure, security systems, service delivery platforms and OSS/BSS solutions.
To make its commercial BladeSystem carrier-grade, HP added NEBS Level 3 rack certification; provided a NEBS-compliant power supply with 36 volt to 72 volt direct current for central office applications; and tweaked the product lifecycle by extending it to three years, which exceeds the norms of 18 months for commercial IT servers.
HP BladeSystem Carrier-Grade Platform supports both RedHat RHEL 5.x and Debian GNU/Linux with HP Telco Extensions, an official, carrier-grade Linux for which HP provides extensive service and support offerings. HP also will support other Linux distributions on a case-by-case basis.
Other notable features of the BladeSystem platforms, according to HP, include:
The c7000-cg model’s enclosure, which consolidates into a single chassis the telecom and enterprise infrastructure, such as cables, power supplies and fans, networking, redundancy and other components. The enclosure supports up to 16 server blades and includes features that save maintenance time, reduce energy costs and minimize risk by simplifying change.
The BL460c-cg server blade, which provides high-performance computing with reliability and energy efficiency. The 2P server blade combines dual-core Intel Xeon series processor performance with greater memory capacity, hot plug SAS drives, simultaneous support of multiple I/O cards, and enhanced remote management.
And the HP Virtual Connect architecture, which simplifies connections to LAN and storage-area network environments, enabling administrators to wire once, then add, replace and recover server resources on the fly. It further minimizes complexity by reducing the number of network cables up to 94 percent. Virtual Connect is available in Ethernet or Fibre Channel options.
HP www.hp.com
