Posted by Tracy Valentine
The telecom world certainly is at the forefront of many industrial network, embedded computing and content management technical innovations. We all have seen the ads on TV, on-line and on our Blackberrys, I-Phones and now our I-Pads about how this service or that service provides you with the latest in 3G, 4G; and stay tuned folks, 10G wireless communications. On top of these network advancements, you can add an explosion of audio and video content applications like: conferencing, call centers, interactive voice response (IVR) servers, media and signaling gateways. It’s enough to make your head hurt figuring out how you’re going to meet the needs of the new networks and the latest converged telephony solutions while still maintaining the older applications and networks all with the same or reduced hardware budget.
New telecom platform architecture hardware like AdvancedTCA (ATCA) certainly meets all of the technical challenges of the latest telecom applications, but at steep hardware and infrastructure costs. ATCA’s hardware platform “cousin” MicroTCA holds a lot of promise, but has some limitations in terms of the breadth of Telco cards available. CompactPCI certainly has proven itself over the years in these types of applications, but cPCI hardware tends to lack the hardware uniformity of ATCA and uTCA platforms. So, what is the answer to this hardware dilemma?
Good ol’ edge card-based computing solutions offer a high degree of system scalability and flexibility at very attractive price points. For example, the Trenton TRC6001 shown below is a 6U rackmount computer built on the PICMG 1.3 system architecture.
The TRC6001 system has the ability to support either eighteen PCI Express or sixteen PCI-X/PCI DSP-based rich media cards for converged telephony applications. Eighteen, full-length PCI Express DSP cards can be supported in the TRC6001 by the Trenton BPX6806 backplane and sixteen PCI-X/PCI version cards are supported by the Trenton BPX6571 backplane. There is one single board computer slot on each backplane to manage traffic between DSP cards. The SBC examples used in this system are the Trenton JXT6966 or a Trenton MCX-series board.
The edge card computing architecture allows you to mix n’ match COTS board hardware to meet a wide variety of network and Telco content apps. The ability to choose different hardware to meet past, current and future telecommunication needs makes systems like the Trenton TRC6001 an ideal hardware platform choice in converged media applications.
This submission is from Jim Renehan, Director of Marketing.
Posted by Tracy Valentine
Industry terms like cloud computing, cluster computing, cross-domain network communications and virtualization can mean different things in different system applications. While these terms can be useful in describing the basic goals of a system, they can sometimes get in the way of focusing in on the practical hardware and software elements needed for effective system solutions. What's needed to solve many of these system requirements described by fancy industry terms are practical system solutions that are affordable, scalable, flexible and designed to meet both the requirements of today as well as those of tomorrow.
Trenton published a whitepaper that helps you navigate through the maze of virtualization possibilities. The whitepaper focuses specifically on various computer system solutions used in implementing cross-domain networks utilizing cloud computing and cluster computing concepts. On the hardware side of the solution equation, multi-segment backplanes and COTS single board computers provide the scalability, flexibility and network security needed in these systems.
There are several hardware platform solutions described in the whitepaper. These COTS system solutions range from the traditional edge-card SBC to the MicroTCA AMC processor card form factors. The whitepaper describes the combination of COTS hardware and software components that enable multiple applications virtualized at different security levels on each SBC or AMC, and multiple HAP clients that can access each board simultaneously.
Click here for a copy of Trenton's whitepaper on virtualization.
This article was submitted by Jim Renehan, Director of Marketing.