The blade mainly targets Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs) faced with performance and throughput limitations on their current generation platforms and is designed to ease upgrades to higher speed processors and network interfaces.

Advantech sees a strong demand to upgrade legacy network elements based on ATCA in carrier-grade installations will continue in parallel to future modernization efforts in Telecom Data Centers.

“The strain on currently deployed equipment is not going to go away as bandwidths increase by factors of ten and network traffic intensifies” said Ching Ko, Director Product Marketing, Advantech Blade Computing Dvision.

“The telecom industry deploys ATCA equipment today in a broad spectrum of products including wireless access, wireless core networks, and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network elements which they are not going to turn off overnight. The introduction of the MIC-5342 demonstrates that Advantech is well-positioned with its extensively field-tested ATCA product portfolioto accompany TEMs and customers from other markets in their upgrade process. Integration of advanced features such as high performance IPSec and crypto offload will help our customers to even achieve even higher efficiencies”.

“The key advantages which Advantech brings to the installed base are optimized product capacity/cost ratio in terms of processing, offload and I/O support and best-in-class telecommunications values such as increased life cycle, high availability, and environmental standards compliance”, said John Muller, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Advantech Networks and Communications Group.

“In addition, our standard product and Customized COTS (C2OTS) framework brings OPEX savings through our global, unified supply chain where spares inventory can be condensed and time to market reduced due to standardized COTS components”.

Advantech’s MIC-5342 is a dual processor ATCA blade based on the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v3 product family. With up to 28 cores and 56 threads of processing power, Intel QuickAssist hardware offload, fastPCI Express gen. 3 lanes running at up to 8Gbps, and best in class virtualization support it offers a significant increase in performance for product upgrades and new equipment designs.

The optimization of features and unmatched flexibility based on Advantech’s leading FMM technology make the MIC-5342 equally well suited for both control plane and application workloads in telecom networks.

Two QPI interfaces connect the CPUs together to improve memory and I/O access throughput and latencies when one processor needs to access resources hosted by the other socket. With four DDR4 DIMMs per socket in a quad channel design running up to 2133MT/s, the MIC-5342 not only offers superior memory bandwidth over 3-channel designs, but can also support RAM density up to 256GB. It outperforms previous generation dual socket designs while keeping similar thermal characteristics with balanced airflow resistance.

The MIC-5342 is shipping now and will be available in August, 2015 for customers to evaluate using Advantech’s Remote Evaluation Service in addition to Advantech’s MIC-5345 ATCA Blade for Server and NFV Applications.