AdvancedTCA ecosystem buildup and proliferation is in an exciting phase. Attractive choices on management modules and so on have actually resulted in transforming the AdvancedTCA community. The form factor has gone well beyond the primary focus of Telco carrier grade applications into enterprise and data center applications as well. In the fabric agnostic world of AdvancedTCA, vendors will deploy applications and value added services in a competitive yet interoperable fashion taking into consideration performance, cost, reliability, availability and features. Interconnect architectures like Serial RapidIO, PCI Express, Advanced Switching, Ethernet, InfiniBand, and StarFabric will target different price points and application requirements.

Introduction

Equipment manufacturers can leverage time-to-market, cost, and product-flexibility benefits by adopting standard off-the-shelf hardware in the form of chassis, management modules, backplane interconnects, single board computers, and the like as specified by AdvancedTCA standards. By focusing instead on high availability middleware, reliable management software, and operating systems and efficient product integration, system vendors can offer differentiated application ready platforms to end customers.

Selecting the best I/O technology appropriate for a specific application is an extremely critical link in this design chain. Ethernet, for example, has been an early leader in the AdvancedTCA world because of the significantly lower hardware cost per port as a result of its widespread adoption as a cost effective bandwidth solution. Closer examination of total cost of ownership rather than just hardware per port cost might however reveal that technologies like InfiniBand will work out to be more competitive, at least for a class of solution. Attempts to extend Ethernet to address carrier grade requirements like high availability, high reliability, and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities may however rob the technology of the advantages of cost and design simplicity. Uncertainties associated with such technology readiness might make the cost and the risk high enough to tip the balance to existing solutions like RapidIO, which can address most of these requirements today, although it is not as widespread today as Ethernet.

We can thus infer that multiplicity of fabric choices for AdvancedTCA applications are really not a hindrance to the proliferation, as some would argue. In fact, limiting interface choices will adversely affect competing innovations needed for the AdvancedTCA solution space at this stage. Current and future I/O technologies ratified through the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) 3.x subsidiary specifications will continue addressing different aspects of application and systems requirements, and these are expected to coexist to enable affordable application proliferation.