Sun Launches ATCA Blade Server for Telecom at CTIA

Wed, April 05, 2006

Sun Microsystems launched a new family of blade servers Wednesday, offering telecommunications customers a choice of processors between Sun’s own UltraSparc or Opteron from Advanced Micro Devices.

Sun announced these Netra Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA)-standard blade servers at the CTIA trade show in Los Angeles, Calif. AdvancedTCA is a series of specifications set by the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, targeted to communications industry requirements for high-speed interconnect technologies, next-generation processors and improved manageability.

Telecommunications is the largest vertical market by revenue for Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif., so the company is staking a lot on this product. The target customers are telecommunications equipment manufacturers and network equipment providers, such as Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, Lucent Technologies and Alcatel. In turn, those companies assemble mobile network infrastructures to sell to carrier companies, said Raju Penumatcha, Sun’s vice president for Netra systems and networking.

That market shifted with Sunday’s announcement of a planned merger between Lucent and Alcatel, but the overall market demand should remain the same, he said.

"The merger does not weaken this market, because it complements their strengths very well; Lucent is strong on CDMA (code-division multiple access), while Alcatel is strong on IPTV (Internet protocol television) and DSL. From my perspective, I don’t see much overlap between the companies," Penumatcha said.

A major selling point for the Netra servers will be their standardized interfaces and range of computing options.

This will help customers reduce operating costs and gain flexibility to add new services, compared to the proprietary systems companies have been deploying in the past three years, said David Rich, director of 64-bit embedded markets for AMD, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Customers can choose single- or dual-core Opteron chips, and Sun’s Solaris 10 or MontaVista Software’s Linux operating system.

The new family includes three machines: the Netra CT900 12U/14 slot ATCA blade server, the Netra CP3010 dual UltraSparc IIIi processor-based ATCA blade, and the Netra CP3020 dual-core AMD Opteron processor-based ATCA blade.

The CT900 and CP3010 have been shipping since March, and the CP3020 is scheduled to ship in three weeks.

-Ben Ames, IDG News Service

Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage.

You are here: Technology Topics » Data Center » News Feature

Most Recent Blade Servers Stories

White Papers »

Delivering a Greener Data Center

This paper covers power utilization, intelligent power management and industry best practices for energy efficiency. Extreme Networks® takes a lifecycle approach to power efficiency, management and recycling, offering savings to our customers and promoting a greener world.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Best Practices in Data Protection - Executive Summary

This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.

Business Centric DLP

This report, by Jon Oltsik from Enterprise Strategy Group, examines the need for a new business-centric approach to DLP in order to align business and security requirements.

Webcasts »

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Virtualizing Microsoft and Oracle on VMware vSphere: Benefits and Best Practices

Virtualizing business-critical applications is an essential step in your journey to the cloud. Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint, and Oracle applications, are often the backbone of business IT. The benefits of virtualizing these applications extend far beyond mere consolidation. Understanding how VMware improves quality of service and agility while reducing costs will help you make the case for taking virtualization to the next level in your company.

Architecting a Modern Approach to Data Management

Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.

Solving the Data Challenge for Real-Time Awareness and Risk Assessment: Webcast

Real-time, global data updates have become a critical business requirement for financial-services firms. Overnight or hourly batch jobs can cause erroneous results and missed opportunities. New regulatory requirements dictate real-time reporting of liquidity; traders want access to real-time market and risk positions; and the time windows for relevancy of cross-selling and marketing opportunities are getting shorter. To deal with these issues and new requirements, firms need to be able to react quickly to changes in data. Quick reactions require near-instant access to data, risk analysis and deeper computational analysis for effective decision making. View this webcast to learn how to achieve real-time awareness by managing ever-increasing data volumes and transaction rates.

Introduction to Virtualization

This video webcast is designed to help those with little to no virtualization experience understand why virtualization and VMware are so important to driving down both capital and operational costs. The session will start with the introduction of the key concepts and technologies of virtualization, introduce the vSphere Hypervisor, and build up to an overview of VMware vSphere® 5, the world's most robust and complete virtualization platform. This session will also discuss new solutions such as the vSphere Storage Appliance and VMware GO that are making it easier than ever before to get started with virtualization.

How Klout Combines Big Data with Microsoft Business Intelligence to Measure Influence

Big Data-it has the potential of transforming a business. In the case of Klout, a social networking analytics site, big data is the heart of the business. Klout processes and analyzes billions of user data signals every day-from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and more. How do they do it? Gain valuable insights from David Mariani, vice president of engineering for Klout.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter