Embedded computing provider Kontron and bladed storage provider Astute Networks today teamed up to introduce an Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) bladed Ethernet server-storage platform for network equipment providers (NEPs) to design edge-level content delivery. The platform is the first the partnership has introduced in a family of blade-storing products based on the ATCA blade and is optimized for telco, IPTV and military applications.

The 2-rack-unit, 2-slot standards-based iSCI-over-Ethernet server-storage platform allows NEPs to circumvent the need for proprietary fiber-channel storage servers. According to Mike Heumann, vice president of sales and marketing for Astute Networks, the platform comes at the same time that carriers are demanding social networking, IPTV and video-on-demand (VOD) content delivery applications that can scale to meet their growing customer base – something proprietary fiber-based servers made difficult.

“One thing we set out to do was to build a product for the ATCA market that gave the same benefits from a storage standpoint that you see with the bladed servers you have with ATCA,” Heumann said. “Storage was something that hadn’t changed much as the servers evolved, and there were nasty operation and deployment problems as people used it for storage. Deploying it, maintaining it and upbringing it become a real nightmare for telecom guys.”

Considering this, he knew that the platform the companies jointly developed had to be equal to or better than fiber channel. Partnering with Kontron allowed the company to provide a platform that can store a large number of videos for VOD applications, for example, in a very small open-systems package. IPTV service includes storage, Sven Freudendfeld, strategic telecom business development for Kontron, added, and time to market can be as important as scale.

“In the content delivery platform, the challenge is basically the storage increase and the performance of streaming video,” Fruedendfeld said. “In order to launch an IPTV service, it is a race. Telecom equipment manufacturers like Alcatel-Lucent cannot afford a 19-to-20-month cycle to deploy. There is a lot of consolidation in the market, and they have limited resources. They won’t build something proprietary. Storage is part of a platform using commercial off-the-shelf building blocks.”


Kontron and Astute’s approach, which will be demonstrated at next week’s NXTComm08 in Las Vegas, allows the providers to choose best-in-breed software in an open-systems environment. NEPs have the flexibility to make their choices and not have it ripple through their entire product line, Heumann said. This has become increasingly important as the market trends towards moving content from local storage to network storage for social networking applications used by sites such as Facebook, Salesforce.com, Google and YouTube, or for IPTV services, where demand for network storage is quickly surpassing current storage capacities.

Freudendfeld said the Intel-based server processing uses the market’s sole 1.5TB iSCI over 10GbE ATCA blade, a more sophisticated way of doing storage applications. This configuration enables NEPs to scale from a 2-slot, 2-rack-unit ATCA platform that supports 300 standard-definition movies deployed in edge networks to a redundant 14-slot ATCA platform that supports 1,800 movies within 9 terabytes of storage deployed in the central office. The platform is both pre-tested and validated, he said.

“Integration channels, even if it’s ATCA, usually take additional time to really fully validate it and test it,” Freudendfeld said. “What we’ve done is two things: One is make sure we have an interoperable product launched very easily and brought to customers in a short period of time. The second thing is we did some benchmarking to give the right information and show the advantages of the combination….We are trying to form an interoperable ecosystem in terms of products, and we are also addressing some items to eliminate additional time for integration.”