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ATCA - Balancing transition
As telecommunications vendors clamour to develop and launch products based around the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA), operators and equipment manufacturers must decide how the standard will shape their business. Robin Kent outlines the core propositions of ATCA, its market potential and the ways in which operators and telecommunications equipment manufacturers can harness its value.
Anybody that has tried his or her hand at plate spinning will know how hard it is to build momentum and keep the plate moving. Anyone skilled - and brave - enough to attempt the feat with several plates at once, will be able to relate to the challenges that the network operators face every day.
The process of migrating from tried and tested proprietary systems to relatively new standards-based platforms is fraught with risks, challenges and concerns. Operators cannot afford to make a sudden switch from one system to another, so no small amount of balance and co-ordination is required to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible. Whilst some standards can be overlooked in favour of proprietary systems, others are simply too significant to ignore.
As one of the most significant telecommunications standards to be developed in recent years, ATCA is set to have a massive influence on the telecommunications industry with more than 200 vendors, ranging from shelf through to card and chassis manufacturers, already developing products based on the standard.
ATCA is an open standard-based platform created by the PCI Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) to provide an architecture for modular components which are capable of rapid integration into high performance and carrier grade service solutions. The main objective of the standard is to increase levels of interoperability between different vendor components to offer greater flexibility when developing infrastructures. In turn, this enables operators to benefit from:
• Reduced time to market for new applications
• Lower upfront development costs
• Less reliance on proprietary solutions
• Increased cost savings through economies of scale
• Greater flexibility of service offerings
• Protection of investment
ATCA has been developed with the needs of the communications industry at its heart and is particularly likely to benefit organisations in the access, edge, and transport and service delivery environments. Whilst there will be peripheral benefits outside of the telecommunications space, it is estimated that approximately 95 per cent of ATCA applications will lie within the communications edge / access and core markets (Source: Venture Development Corporation).
Given the level of attention currently being paid to the development of ATCA-compliant products by major players like Sun Microsystems, Intel and Motorola, it is widely anticipated that ATCA, along with its sister architecture MicroTCA, will become the dominant open standards force in the Communications Computing Equipment space by 2009.
Market acceptance
Since it was first formally introduced in 2003, ATCA adoption has exceeded previous standards-based architectures, such as PCI or VME, yet market penetration has remained relatively low, as many carriers remain largely unaware or unconvinced of ATCA's value proposition. Telecommunications equipment manufacturers (TEMs) too have taken time to explore the full business case for ATCA and determine their approach to the standard. In many regards, it faces the classic challenges of standardisation (eg compatibility, proven interoperability, slow uptake and competition with the sheer volume of other standards), but recent developments within the telecommunications industry are set to change ATCA's fortunes for the better.
2006 saw the creation of two new industry organisations that are now helping to develop the mainstream market for a standards-based communications platform. At the beginning of the year, the SCOPE Alliance was formed to promote the availability of open carrier-grade base platforms based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware/ software and free open-source software building blocks. The organisation's efforts were then bolstered by the formation of the Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA) in April 2006 to address the interoperability certification requirements, which meant that the core elements for creating a mainstream market were now in place for the first time.
Because these components have only recently come together, ATCA is still a technology in development and remains the subject of extensive trials and evaluations. This practice is likely to become more commonplace through 2007, but it could be 2009 before large-scale field deployments commence.
Applications: ATCA and IMS
ATCA reflects a fundamental shift in the industry's approach to the development of telecommunication architectures. The days of structured deployments, planned well in advance, for long-life revenue generating applications are a thing of the past and they are now being superseded by constantly evolving architectures, capable of providing the flexibility to meet service providers' demands, quickly. Perhaps one of the most compelling illustrations of ATCA's benefits is its role in facilitating IP Multimedia Subsytems (IMS).
The IMS proposition is centred on the flexibility it has to enable operators to provide customers with the very latest revenue-generating IP-based services, such as interactive gaming or streaming video. The open standards-based architecture of ATCA can be used to facilitate this requirement by enabling TEMs and service providers to re-use the computing foundation for their products.
ATCA provides the foundation for a flexible, scalable, high-performance architecture that is more than capable of meeting these demands. It can help to lower both capex and opex by reducing the time to market for new services and significantly lowering development costs. This is a key consideration when factoring in the cost associated with operating a constantly evolving architecture and the potentially short commercial lifecycle of new applications and services.
To ATCA, or, not to ATCA?
So far, we have discussed some of the clear benefits of embracing ATCA, but it is also clear that the standard does not offer an overnight panacea. Inevitably, there are aspects of the telecommunications network that will need to remain in place for the foreseeable future, and it is also true that some aspects of the infrastructure may not be best served by ATCA.
There are a number of scenarios in which it might be more appropriate to use non-ATCA products, including for entry range, cheap or mass produced technologies and high-density input and output interfaces associated with processing. In response to these challenges, the PICMG has already begun specifications for MicroTCA.
The MicroTCA standard promises to offer many of the features of ATCA in a smaller, lower cost format that is suited to network edge and enterprise applications. Because of this, MicroTCA is likely to have broader appeal beyond TEMs and operators but, crucially for the telecommunication market, it shares the same system architecture as ATCA. This means it can be controlled by the same management software and enables a relatively simple migration between the two platforms. Moving forward, it seems that combining the two standards will enable vendors and operators alike to benefit from greater economies of scale.
Over the next 3-5 years, systems architects will need to perform a plate spinning role to ensure that operators can reap the benefits of their existing proprietary systems alongside open standards-based platforms. With the rise of COTS hardware, open systems and applications, and the move toward IMS infrastructures, underpinned by ATCA, the economic viability of proprietary systems is inevitably being called into question. However, as one of the largest overheads in its operational expenditure, it is understandable that operators will want to protect the investment they have made in the applications developed on these networks.
Taking the step from proprietary to standards-based systems will necessarily require a phased approach as there are key considerations for the TEM community to explore before they wholeheartedly commit to any standard-based platform. The proprietary systems they currently operate have been developed to deliver 99.999 per cent availability and ensuring this is maintained throughout both the migration process and the lifetime of the new network is a major priority. Some may also be concerned about the cost and time implications of re-writing applications as they move from legacy to standards-based systems. Others will focus on the fundamental change to product development process as they shift from an internally run project to a multiple vendor management exercise.
Standards-based solutions offer far greater levels of portability than their proprietary cousins. Suppliers exploiting the ATCA platform are not going to be locked into a specific hardware OEM because they are able to select the best solution for the same standard technology. The openness of ATCA is comparable to that of the Linux OS, in that it is distributed by many vendors and supported on every ATCA CPU board. Therefore, adopting a standards-based approach to infrastructure development can benefit both the customer and vendor by creating a robust environment with the flexibility and scalability to support innovation and evolution.
So how can operators begin to address these challenges? On the surface the options are clear - they either adopt or ignore ATCA - but both approaches have their downfalls. Choosing the former at this particular point in time may result in long-term benefits, but until the technology is more widespread and proven it could be seen as an expensive, high-risk approach. On the other hand, a failure to prepare for the introduction of ATCA-compliant technologies could cause them to lose ground to the competition over the medium to long-term.
It is clear that readying the infrastructure for the adoption of ATCA, without compromising the operator's ability to exploit existing and forthcoming revenue opportunities in the interim, has to be their ultimate goal. To achieve this aim they will need to re-evaluate both the hardware upon which their existing infrastructure is based and the capabilities of the software systems they use to help them deal with emerging standards and protocols.
Robin Kent is Director of Operations with Adax Europe
www.adax.com
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