RadiSys Announces First ATCA Single Board Computer for the 4G Market

RadiSys® Corporation  a leading global provider of advanced embedded solutions, announced the release of its Promentum® ATCA-4500, a new AdvancedTCA (ATCA) single board computer (SBC) utilizing the new Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series.

The ATCA-4500 combines high performance with large memory capacity and expansion flexibility to address advanced control, gateway and telecom server functions for a broad set of 4G applications including LTE (Long-Term Evolution), WiMAX, NMS (Network Management Systems), and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). The ATCA-4500 represents seventh-generation RadiSys ATCA blade technology delivering on the promise of Moore’s law – doubling the number of transaction or subscriber units that Telecom Service Providers can handle per ATCA slot – thereby, dramatically reducing cost per unit.

radisys promentum atca-4500

“We bring true innovation and system level thinking to every product we design and the Promentum ATCA-4500 encapsulates the best in single board computers,” said Anthony Ambrose, RadiSys Vice President and General Manager, Communications Networks. “As the market leader in Integrated ATCA System deployments, the ATCA-4500 complements our other market leading products using DSP, packet processing and switching technology in building the world’s best 10G ATCA platform.”

RadiSys’ ATCA-4500 has been optimized to meet Telecom Equipment Manufacturer (TEM) requirements for easily integrating into an existing ATCA chassis and for supporting multiple storage options and OS virtualization. The ATCA-4500 features an innovative virtualization solution that allows TEMs to streamline the complexities of their network element configurations and ease the porting of legacy application software and operating systems.

The ATCA-4500 is based on breakthrough Intel processing technology enabling TEMs to use higher performing silicon at the system level. A single Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series will outperform the previous generation of Intel® Xeon® Processors 5400 series by up to 25% using standard computing benchmark.* The ATCA-4500 is based on single socket design technology and provides TEMs with higher performance while being packaged such that it is fully upgradeable for next generation performance, safeguarding their investments in hardware by avoiding costly redesigns when new processing technology from Intel hits the market.

“Intel’s highest performing processor, the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series, is designed to meet the performance and virtualization requirements for the most demanding storage, security and communications infrastructure applications,” said Doug Davis, vice president and general manager, Embedded and Communication Group of Intel. “This enables the RadiSys Promentum® ATCA-4500 to support both legacy and next generation applications on the same virtualized communications element without sacrificing performance.”

“TEMs must increasingly look to COTS and ATCA to provide the processing capacity to keep up with increasing network and application complexity,” said Lee Doyle, Vice President and General Manager, Network Infrastructure, IDC. “The ATCA-4500 is a cost effective solution to allow TEMs to increase the subscriber density per system.”

RadiSys Promentum ATCA-4500

The ATCA-4500, with the new Intel® Xeon® processor L5518, has been designed to offer the highest performance while minimizing the total cost of ownership. It offers more than a 50% increase in performance per watt per dollar over a dual socket Intel® Xeon® processor L5408 based ATCA blade. The processor and feature set were selected so it could pass the NEBS thermal requirements in chassis already deployed in the field, eliminating the need for a fork lift upgrade. Support for a massive 8 DIMM array of VLP DDR3 scales up to 64G of memory while providing cost effective options for applications with lower density memory requirements. The board offers multiple storage options, including RAID, SAS/SATA, solid state USB flash drives and supports iSCSI boot, allowing TEMs to achieve their storage requirements around performance, flexibility, reliability and cost. For low-level software, the ATCA-4500 is based on Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI), which is a significant improvement over the old legacy BIOS firmware. The EFI provides a pre-operating system shell where customers can build and execute EFI applications, such as setup, OS install, diagnostic or configuration utilities. Support for extended Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x and VT-d) on the board decreases the overhead associated with virtualization, making it the ideal platform for use cases that require virtualization. The ATCA-4500 has been tested against the guidelines offered by CP-TA to ensure interoperability across the ATCA ecosystem.

The ATCA-4500 will be available as a building block or fully validated and integrated into the RadiSys family of platforms which include 2, 5, 14 and 16 slot systems. The board has been validated with third-party hardware including products from SANBlaze, Interphase and Astute Networks.

Key Features

  • Based on the Intel® Xeon® Processor L5518 with integrated memory control
  • Uses the LGA 1366 socket, allows support for other processors in Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 family
  • Supports up to 64GB DDR ECC registered SDRAM via 8 VLP sockets
  • Supports mid-height Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC), supporting Ethernet, PCI Express, SAS, already validated with various I/O and storage AMCs
  • Optional dual user flash up to 16Gb each
  • Supports Hardware RAID 0/1
  • Dual 10Gb/1Gb Ethernet Fabric Interface

RadiSys ATCA Ecosystem

In addition to the ATCA-4500’s rich feature set, RadiSys has equipped its industry leading REDI lab with the ATCA-4500, which has enabled its ecosystem partners to begin early OS, middleware and application integration prior to market availability. This complete application ready development approach has been able to speed RadiSys’ partners’ development activities and reduce costs through innovative remote development capabilities found in the REDI lab.

The ATCA-4500 supports Wind River’s Carrier Grade Linux platform. The board will also support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and MontaVista CGE 4.0 and 5.0 to cover RadiSys’ entire customer base. Certification is also planned with VMware ESX 3.5.

Availability

The Promentum ATCA-4500 is shipping now in limited quantities with production shipment in Q3. It is available for demonstration in the REDI lab.

About RadiSys Corporation

RadiSys (NASDAQ: RSYS) is a leading provider of advanced solutions for the communications networking and commercial systems markets. Through intimate customer collaboration and combining innovative technologies and industry leading architecture, RadiSys helps OEMs, systems integrators, and solution providers bring better products to market faster and more economically. RadiSys products include embedded boards, application enabling platforms, the OS-9 operating system, and turn-key systems, which are used in today’s complex computing, processing, and network-intensive applications. RadiSys is a Premier Member with the Intel® Embedded and Communications Alliance, a community of embedded and communications developers and solution providers. For more information, visit http://www.radisys.com, write to info@radisys.com, or call 800-950-0044 or 503-615-1100. Editors seeking more information may contact Lyn Pangares at RadiSys Corporation at 503-615-1220 or lyn.pangares@radisys.com.

Source: Press Release