 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2007 |
| Article no.: | 13 | |
| Topic: | Interoperability delivered | |
| Author: | Shlomo Pri-Tal | |
| Title: | President and Chairman of the Board of Directors | |
| Organisation: | Communications Platforms Trade Association (CP-TA) | |
| PDF size: | 244KB |
About author
Shlomo Pri-Tal is the President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Communications Platforms Trade Association. He is also the Director and Group Technology Officer for Motorola’s Embedded Communications Computing business. In his role as Chief Technology Officer, Mr Pri-Tal leads the team responsible for embedded computing technology and oversees the company’s participation in standards development organizations and industry consortia. A long-time proponent of standardization, he has written extensively on the role of standards in the creation of market value and industry ecosystems and is a frequent speaker at industry events. Mr Pri-Tal currently serves on PICMG’s Executive Board.
Article abstract
The Communications Platforms Trade Association, CP-TA, is creating a mainstream market for interoperable communications platforms by solving interoperability issues that are not currently addressed by existing communications equipment standards. By eliminating differences in the existing specifications and reducing the room for individual interpretation, and establishing a testing and certification procedure to ensure adherence to the standards, the CP-TA expects to guarantee the interoperability of certified equipment. This will reduce time to market, lower integration costs, allow alternative sourcing and lower costs.
Full Article
The Communications Platforms Trade Association, CP-TA, was launched to drive a mainstream market for interoperable communications platforms by solving interoperability issues that are not currently addressed by the existing specifications in the communications platforms industry. This article includes an overview of CP-TA and its objectives, describes the documentation produced by CP-TA, and describes the test tools developed and used by the CP-TA community. The CP-TA certification process along with the future direction of CP-TA is also discussed. The communications platforms industry has developed a rich set of open specifications to build modular communications platforms. However, the specifications were developed so that they could apply to as many sectors as possible, including the communications, manufacturing and automotive industries. As a result, the specifications contain many requirements that are optional for some applications but mandatory for others. Additionally, each of the developers who design their product to meet the requirements of a specification will interpret some of the requirements in a different manner to other developers. Both interpretations can be correct but lead to products that are not interoperable. These factors and others have prevented the industry from converging towards an ecosystem of interoperable building blocks. CP-TA was formed to fill this interoperability gap. The Communications Platforms Trade Association, or CP-TA, is an industry-wide effort that is working to develop a certification process that ensures interoperable hardware and software building blocks for communications platforms, based on open industry specifications. Interoperability benefits CP-TA certified interoperable building blocks offer a variety of benefits. For network equipment providers: • Faster time-to-market; • Lower integration costs; • Alternative sourcing and product choice; • Economies of scale through mainstream COTS, Commercial Off-The-Shelf, adoption. For service providers: • Faster time-to-revenue; • Lower operational costs; • Alternative sourcing and product choice. Interoperability requirements CP-TA is developing interoperability test requirements based on existing open specifications from PICMG, PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, the Linux Foundation and the Service Availability Forum, as well as upon system-level profiles developed by the SCOPE Alliance. Starting at the hardware layer, CP-TA is initially focusing on certifying building blocks to interoperability requirements based on PICMG’s specifications. In February 2007, the group released its first Interoperability Compliance Document, ICD, and Test Procedure Manual, TPM, based on AdvancedTCA, Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture. The ICD defines a set of requirements to build interoperable communications platforms. The TPM defines test procedures for those requirements. Together, these two documents allow vendors to design and deliver interoperable open specifications-based products. The ICD and TPM address three integral areas of interest for communications’ providers who construct AdvancedTCA platforms: thermal, manageability and data transport. The thermal area defines a standardized method for measuring slot airflow and board impedance measurements. Manageability addresses issues with IPMI, Intelligent Platform Management Interface, functionality of the AdvancedTCA boards and shelf managers as well as the other managed FRUs, field-replaceable units, in an AdvancedTCA system. Data Transport narrows the PICMG options and defines signal integrity requirements for the circuit boards and backplanes. Interoperability As stated earlier, some of the AdvancedTCA requirements are optional for a specific application. To attain interoperability, CP-TA has promoted many of the optional requirements found in current industry specifications to mandatory requirements in the ICD. For example, the ICD communications platform promotes certain requirements to mandatory status since they involve communication with the shelf manager. The shelf manager ensures service availability in a computing platform by monitoring built-in sensors to predict failures. When not mandated (as it is now), one vendor’s shelf manager implementation may not send an error status, reducing the system’s reliability and security. On the other hand, if a shelf manager vendor has implemented these requirements then some of the functions may not work – interoperate – with the system of another vendor that has not implemented them. Moreover, there are many requirements in current communications specifications that can be, and are, interpreted by different vendors differently. Such vague requirements are one of the key reasons for the current interoperability issues among the AdvancedTCA building blocks. CP-TA intends to resolve these ambiguities in future releases. Test configuration: an example Currently CP-TA has adopted the ATCA-Tester from ESO Technologies as a software test tool for the manageability domain. CP-TA certification process The first set of interoperability requirements, detailed test procedures and industry-harmonized test tools have been released and are available at www.cp-ta.org. Initially CP-TA members will test their products primarily in-house. Moreover, CP-TA is in the process of establishing periodic InteropFests that will provide a confidential environment for the CP-TA community to align their execution of CP-TA tests as well as offer a true multi-vendor environment for enhanced interoperability testing. CP-TA held its first InteropFest in November 2006 in conjunction with PICMG’s AIW events. The two organizations are planning a second InteropFest for June 2007. CP-TA’s goal is to build a cost-efficient certification programme for the CP-TA community. By defining block categories such as managed shelf, shelf manager, switchboard, operating system, intelligent sub-FRUs and front boards, systems can all be tested against applicable CP-TA test procedures. Products that comply with the specification will be marked as CP-TA Certified. Since the AdvancedTCA architecture encompasses electrical, mechanical, thermal, interconnect and software areas, each type of component has to be tested for all these attributes that are applicable. CP-TA has issued a request for proposal, RFP, for a third-party lab, capable of running CP-TA certification testing. The group plans to select a lab in June 2007 and have the lab running certification testing by November 2007. Conclusions and future work Attaining interoperability at the system level, not just the component level, is the key prerequisite on the way to mainstream adoption of open, specifications-based, carrier-grade platforms. CP-TA is now addressing interoperability issues for AMCs and in the future will address interoperability requirements at the OS and middleware layers. CP-TA brings together the industry in a concerted effort to lay out a set of testable requirements essential to platform interoperability. Equally important, the trade association is creating the complementary test procedures and underlying test tools that will validate conformance to these interoperability requirements. This lays the foundation for an industry-wide programme for interoperable building blocks certified by an independent test lab. As modular components that have been designed, tested and certified for baseline interoperability become available, integrators will increasingly have the flexibility to cost effectively mix and match components from different vendors into base AdvancedTCA platforms. Ultimately, the success of the CP-TA certification programme will be measured by the improved economics of deploying carrier grade infrastructure solutions based on open specifications. Acknowledgements Thanks go to Nirlay Kundu, Motorola; Todd Keaffaber, Intel; and Rajesh Poornachandran for their contributions to this article.
