Emerson Network Power Announces Industry’s Highest Density ATCA Media Processing Blade

These applications include session border controllers, media gateways and servers, media resource functions, mobile video optimization, video communications and conferencing servers, and interactive voice and video response systems.

The new blade is the first result of a collaboration between Emerson Network Power and Octasic, a leading innovator of media and baseband processing solutions. The ATCA-8320 is the first ATCA blade in the market that uses Octasic’s ground-breaking asynchronous DSP technology and also features Octasic’s Vocallo MGW voice and video software. This award-winning software makes it easier for developers to create and use arrays of media processing resources in highly complex voice- and video-enabled applications.

Emerson Network Power’s ATCA-8320 media processing blade can enable a significant reduction in the hardware footprint of the telecom central office by replacing many traditional server or other media processing blades when adding voice or video functionality to a communications system. The blade can offload voice and video processing from an X86-based system at resolutions up to 1080p. Its unique “gateway-on-a-blade” architecture also makes it suitable for use as a standalone gateway element, allowing a high degree of scalability from very small systems up to very large. In addition to a bank of up to 24 Octasic OCT2224M DSPs, the ATCA-8320 blade features an eight-core Freescale™ QorIQ™ P4080 device for advanced IP flow management and distribution and a dual core Intel® Core™ i7 processor for local control and management applications. This unique combination of processor technologies is designed to maximize the flow processing and management capability of a single ATCA blade. A new white paper from Emerson Network Power describes the system architectures that this combination of technologies enables in the implementation of the most common media processing network elements.

“The ability to manipulate media streams in carrier networks has become a source of critical advantage to network operators and service providers. The ATCA-8320 brings multicore DSPs and the powerful Vocallo voice and video software together with Emerson’s leading ATCA system heritage and thermal design skill, resulting in an industry-leading media processing density for the next generation of ATCA-based voice and video processing systems,” said Rob Pettigrew, marketing director of Emerson Network Power’s Embedded Computing business. “By enabling developers to offer a low entry cost and pay-as-you-grow options for their users, this is the latest example of how Emerson is working to address the time-to-market, efficiency, and performance concerns of equipment manufacturers.”

“We are very excited to be working with the leader in ATCA systems to bring our ground-breaking DSP technology to telecom network developers,” said James Awad, director of marketing for Octasic Inc. “We are looking forward to developing more innovative solutions that combine our two companies’ expertise.”

The ATCA-8320 uses a modular design that allows developers to configure options to suit their application, enable smooth transitions between product generations, increase return on investment, and ensure the ability to handle future requirements, which could lead to significant competitive advantages. It is optimized to work with Emerson Network Power’s range of ATCA system platforms which cover two-slot, six-slot and 14-slot variants that are designed to meet the need of both telecom central office and network data center environments.