Industry's most powerful ATCA system unveiled

Artesyn has pre-certified a range of application-ready configurations of the Centellis 8000 series for NEBS Level 3 to save customers development time and cost. The new ATCA systems can be deployed in existing networks as well as emerging Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments. A wide variety of payload blades and software enable it to be deployed in a range of applications such as session border controllers, content optimization and security appliances. AC and DC versions make the platform suitable for telecom central office, network data center and enterprise data center deployments.

Todd Wynia, vice president for communication products, Artesyn Embedded Technologies, said: “Successive generations of server class processors have required up to 21 percent more power and the latest generation ATCA blades are already drawing the equivalent of 300 watts in cooling requirements. As we integrate blades with even higher performance processors, more memory capacity and throughput, hardware accelerators and increased IO bandwidth the thermal performance of an ATCA system becomes a critical factor in network deployments. Most other large (14-slot) ATCA systems claim support for a maximum of 300 watts per slot with some claiming up to 450 watts, but Artesyn’s Centellis 8000 series is the first to be able to accommodate up to 600 watts per slot.”

The Centellis 8000 series supports the company’s recently announced System Services Framework (SSF) software, a centralized management software suite to configure and monitor software and hardware components in a single shelf or complex system of multiple ATCA shelves. Artesyn believes that SSF could save up to 40 percent of customers’ time-to-market. The Centellis 8000 series also supports Artesyn’s FlowPilot™ software for advanced load balancing and packet classification, directing traffic flow to individual payload processors for further processing.

A Centellis™ 8000 system is 18U (798mm) high and designed for standard 19 inch rack mounting. It features a 40GbE dual-star fabric interface and 14 blade slots, including two switching slots into which Artesyn’s leading 40G combined switching and system management blade (ATCA-F140) can be integrated. The ATCA-F140 can be customized thanks to an AMC site, hard drive bay and optional telecom clocking module as well as numerous factory build and customer-field-configurable options.