Artesyn Embedded Technologies announced the ATCA-7480, a new packet and server processing AdvancedTCA® (ATCA®) blade featuring dual Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v3 processors, also announced by Intel. The power of the new Intel Xeon processor family combined with the blade’s high speed data paths between processors, up to 512 GB DDR4 memory and I/O enables short response times for database access and accelerated pattern matching, and can also help optimize routing decisions in virtualized network environments. Artesyn’s optional hardware accelerators, directly connected to the processors, can accelerate encryption/decryption algorithms and can greatly enhance throughput of encrypted data in security applications. Cost sensitive applications will benefit from the sixteen memory sockets, which means a developer can use lower cost, lower capacity DIMMs for applications that don’t require the full 512 GB potential memory capacity.

Using the recently announced Intel® XL710 network interface controllers, the ATCA-7480 features an Artesyn QuadStar™ backplane interface consisting of four 40G Ethernet networks that connect all the blades in a system. System integrators have the choice of combining channels to create different redundant and non-redundant topologies, depending on the application bandwidth and availability requirements. By integrating multiple ATCA-7480 blades with up to four 40G hub blades into a single shelf, applications can benefit from aggregate bandwidth up to 1 Tb/s in an appropriate ATCA shelf, such as Artesyn’s Centellis™ 8000. Also, the high thermal and cooling capability of Artesyn’s Centellis 8000 system, up to 600 W per slot, enables users to specify higher performance processsors or more cores on the ATCA-7480 blade, meaning up to 28 cores per slot and up to 336 cores per ATCA shelf.

Todd Wynia, vice president for communication products, Artesyn Embedded Technologies, said: “Network functions virtualization (NFV) was envisaged to bring enterprise cloud concepts to the telecom world. However, one challenge is that enterprise class servers, so ubiquitous in the enterprise cloud, do not provide the compute density, I/O bandwidth, and carrier-grade ‘hardness’ required by many telecom applications. Addressing these requirements, Artesyn has worked closely with Intel to provide the carrier-class server platforms needed to build an NFV node in a true telecom environment.”

Renu Navale, Director of Ecoystem Programs for the Communications & Storage Infrastruture Group at Intel, said: “Using the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor family with the features of the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) enabled Artesyn to create an incredibly compute-dense platform with extremely high interconnect bandwidth, a key requirement of today’s communications applications.”

The ATCA-7480 blade includes enabling software for Artesyn’s SDN/NFV solutions, including support for Intel DPDK-accelerated OpenVSwitch, OpenFlow and OpenStack plug-ins for managing virtualization services on the computing platform. The blade will also support Wind River’s Carrier Grade Communications Server, a fully integrated and feature-complete software platform that enables an NFV infrastructure to achieve the ultra-reliability and high performance mandated for telecom networks.

Artesyn has also joined the Wind River Titanium Cloud, an ecosystem of industry-leading hardware and software companies collaborating to pre-integrate and validate platforms to accelerate the deployment of NFV solutions.

Visitors to the Intel Developer Forum at Moscone West in San Francisco this week can see a live demonstration of the Artesyn ATCA-7480 blade with Artesyn’s SDN/NFV enabling software as part of the Intel® Network Builders Alliance demonstration.