Artesyn debuts 100G-capable open-standard server

Artesyn Embedded Technologies has brought to market what it describes as the industry's most powerful AdvancedTCA (ATCA) open-standard server system. The Centellis 8840 features 160G aggregate bandwidth capacity to each blade presently, and future 400G to each blade that can support power and cooling for up to 600W per blade. The solution also incorporates the 100G ATCA technology into a NEBS-ready platform that will accept 40G ATCA blades and 100G blades when they become available.

Network equipment providers and carriers developing SDN/NFV network security and optimisation, where deep packet inspection techniques are used to process massive data flows in real time, can now use a full payload of today's highest performance advanced processing and networking blades in a platform future-proofed for higher powered processors, noted Artesyn.

The company has implemented an innovative QuadStar backplane architecture to provide four independent networks supporting up to 400Gb/s aggregated bandwidth to every blade. Customers can achieve an aggregated system bandwidth of 1.6TB/s with no redundancy using today's 40G switches and processor blades. When 100G switches and processor blades become available, the same QuadStar technology can enable up to 4TB/s aggregate system bandwidth in a non-redundant implementation using the same chassis and backplane.

To provide customers with flexible configuration options, Artesyn offers a portfolio of ATCA processing and networking blades based on Intel Xeon or Cavium OCTEON processor or DSPs from TI or Octasic. The latest is the ATCA-7480 QuadStar packet processing blade based on two Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 family processors providing the highest performance class with up to 28 processing cores per blade, indicated Artesyn.

The Centellis 8840 supports the company's System Services Framework (SSF) software, a centralised management software suite to configure and monitor software and hardware components in a single shelf or complex system of multiple ATCA shelves. Artesyn believes that SSF could save up to 40 per cent of customers' time-to-market. The Centellis 8840 also supports Artesyn's FlowPilot software for advanced load balancing and packet classification, directing traffic flow to individual payload processors for further processing.