Emerson Network Power ATCA-7470 40G ATCA blade

The latest 40G AdvancedTCA (ATCA) packet processing blade from Emerson Network Power - the ATCA-7470 - is designed to utilise the full capabilities of the Intel platform for communications infrastructure, formerly codenamed Crystal Forest, with an optimised balance of processing, memory, I/O, data movement and interfaces.

The ATCA-7470 combines a fast memory subsystem with balanced high-performance offload engines and full bandwidth active/active 40G fabric interfaces. The blade will offer greater flexibility in telecom equipment deployments, enabling the provision of more, and more valuable, subscriber services at lower cost.

The ATCA-7470 features a variety of high-speed interfaces for both ATCA fabric and direct connections. The highest performance Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family is supported by balanced offload acceleration provided by the Intel Chipset 89xx Series. Combined, these provide system support to enable high throughput of both packet-processing and control plane workloads.

A key feature enabling this consolidation is the Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), which is fully supported by the ATCA-7470. The optimised libraries included in the Intel DPDK enable fast packet movement in the data plane using multicore Intel processors, and the Intel DPDK thus enables the faster execution of packet processing workloads across the network without sacrificing security.

By implementing packet processing together with other data plane and control plane functions on a single, Intel platform, telecom equipment manufacturers can benefit from lower development costs and the use of common tool suites, helping enable faster time to market, as well as the ability to balance workloads efficiently across the available hardware resources.

The ATCA-7470 is optimised to work with Emerson Network Power’s range of ATCA system platforms which cover 2-, 6- and 14-slot variants that are designed to meet the need of both telecom central office and network data centre environments.