Kontron's AdvancedTCA Carrier Board for AdvancedMC Modules

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Kontron has introduced the AT8400, one of the world’s first commercially available AdvancedTCA carrier board that supports up to four full-height, hot-swappable AdvancedMC modules. The AdvancedMC-bays can be populated with a wide variety of field-replaceable modules, such as Processor-AMCs, Storage-AMCs and telecom specific I/O-AMCs. With this flexibility, the AT8400 significantly simplifies and expands the design options available to telecom and network equipment manufacturers planning to design systems using open modular communications platforms.

In order to support a wide range of hot-swappable AdvancedMC module configurations, the AT8400 board features an entire PCI-Express and a Gigabit Ethernet switching infrastructure, a SAS controller to support storage AdvancedMCs, as well as a redundant base interface, a dual redundant fabric interface, and a telco clock for each slot.

Fully hot-swappable, the AT8400 is suitable for dual-star and full-mesh configurations in 14- and 16-slot systems, and can be managed via SNMP, TELNET, CLI, either In-band or out-of-band via 10/100Base-T Ethernet or RS232. With full IPMI 1.5 support, the AT8400 also features a dedicated microcontroller as an additional Firmware Update Manager (FWUM) for field upgrades, rollbacks and watchdog functions.

Telecom and network equipment manufacturers who design various wireless or wireline network elements can now choose from several configurations of Kontron AdvancedTCA and AdvancedMC building blocks, fully integrated into a total open modular solution, such as:

1) 1 x Processor AMC; 1 x Storage AMC; 1 x DSP AMC; and 1 x I/O AMC
Ideal for an IMS-based VoIP Gateway with the OS on the processor and storage AMCs, while DSP AMC to handle transcoding application.

2) 4 x Processor AMCs
Utilized for an assortment of applications that require high processing performance on multiple independent processing nodes on one AdvancedTCA board.

3) 2 x Processor AMCs; 2 x Storage AMCs
To power fully redundant database/storage applications.

4) 1 x Processor AMC; 3 x Storage AMCs (SAS)
For a RAID 5 storage implementation using SAS AMCs
(i.e. to store multimedia content such as streaming video.)

5) 3 x I/O AMCs; 1 x Storage AMC
Driven by a CPU blade, this would be used as a general purpose I/O extension.

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