From its beginnings in 2001, the focus of the AdvancedTCA (ATCA) effort has been to define "an open platform standard that meets the needs of telecom infrastructure equipment for the next ten years." One of the top "needs of telecom infrastructure equipment" is high availability, especially when that equipment is used to deploy value-added services for which downtime equals lost revenue. But ATCA equipment can be costly. Is it worth the switch?
Prior to the availability of ATCA, CompactPCI (cPCI) and proprietary systems were the platforms of choice for creating highly available solutions. But as the ATCA ecosystem continues to grow, with more and more products on the market, service providers and equipment vendors are evaluating the costs of making the switch to ATCA from cPCI and proprietary systems.
This paper compares high availability solutions developed with standards-based cPCI and ATCA components. It details the capital expenses of creating a solution with five-nines availability, and discusses the operational and opportunity cost of service failures and downtime, which are often overlooked during the cost analysis of providing highly available services.