Artesyn Embedded Technologies unveiled the MaxCore™ 
application-enabling platform, which enables providers of broadcast, networking, cloud, industrial and military/aerospace equipment to simplify and accelerate their deployment of appliances for SDN/NFV, virtualized multiscreen video infrastructure, OTT video, WebRTC, VoLTE, and other high performance networked computing applications. Industrial applications include semiconductor manufacturing, while military and aerospace applications include radar and sonar systems.
Using industry-standard hardware and software building blocks, including Artesyn’s Silver Lining™ software, customers can reduce the cost of managing OTT video and create the infrastructure to support a new generation of technologies in broadcast, streaming, networking and telecom.
The versatile MaxCore architecture enables operators to create either massively dense single-function appliances or to deploy multiple independent virtual network functions (VNFs), such as voice or video transcoding, on a single platform. Housed in a 3U rack-mountable enclosure and designed for deployment in carrier-grade infrastructure, Artesyn’s MaxCore platform can help reduce the capital and operating expense of deploying cloud infrastructure, while allowing it to scale as needed. The server platform can accommodate up to 15 add-in cards, flexibly configured for either processing cards or networking IO cards, and connected without cables for high-performance and simple configuration.
“The modern microserver or small-bladed high-performance computing system has been dominated to date by the kind of dedicated appliances that our customers have told us they want to move away from,” said Linsey Miller, director of server acceleration marketing, Artesyn Embedded Technologies. “The new MaxCore platform brings the first open, standards-based option of its kind to market. Customers can now eliminate multiple application-specific hardware platforms and save both capital expense and operating expense. Combined with Silver Lining software, Artesyn’s solutions now scale from the edge to the core of operator networks across multiple compute and media processing offerings with support for OpenFlow for SDN and OpenStack for NFV, enabling service providers to run ePC, firewall/security, DPI, session border and OTT video virtual applications on common scalable hardware.”
A single 3U MaxCore platform, fully configured with Artesyn SharpStreamer™ add-in acceleration cards, is capable of supporting up to 616 streams of 1080p HD video, which equals over 200 streams per rack unit. Comparable server platforms claim between 90 and 110 HD video streams per rack unit, while the industry average using standard rack mount servers is 5.54 streams per rack unit1. For speech transcoding, measured by G.711 to G.729 sessions, a typical standard server can support up to 4,600 per rack unit versus 31,000 per rack unit in a MaxCore platform, or 93,000 for the complete 3U system. While standard rack mount servers are ideal for smaller scale density requirements, Artesyn’s MaxCore platform is optimized for hosted cloud and high density deployments. Combined with a significant reduction in floor space and power consumption, the density and flexibility of the Artesyn MaxCore platform makes it the most cost-effective, scale-out infrastructure for video transcoding with 14 times the performance density when compared to 1U servers, up to 75 percent lower equipment cost, and over 90 percent lower power and cooling cost.
The MaxCore platform integrates a highly dense and versatile hardware architecture, which can accommodate up to 30 Intel® Xeon® processor D devices, with cloud infrastructure and management software based on open technologies. This combination helps to simplify and accelerate the deployment of SDN/NFV infrastructure, broadcast and streaming equipment, voice and video transcoding solutions, and other high performance networked computing applications.
Artesyn’s MaxCore platform is designed to bridge the gap between standard rack-mount servers and dedicated single-purpose appliances:
Traditional rack-mount servers assume a single host processor with a small number of PCI Express IO cards, or multiple independent server nodes with no or minimal local IO extension capability. The MaxCore platform can be flexibly configured to support any combination of up to 15 Artesyn microserver cards, media acceleration add-in cards or third-party PCI Express cards, connected without cables. It uses an innovative internal architecture, based on new PCI Express switching technology called ExpressFabric®, to enable developers to implement multiple connected servers within the same enclosure. The integrator can create several independent server domains in the same enclosure or can allow independent processors to share PCI Express cards, such as a network I/O cards.
Artesyn’s MaxCore platform can operate from a 90-264 Vac or -48 Vdc power source, and features redundant hot-swappable cooling fans and power supplies, making it suitable for deployment in telecom central office, network data center or IT equipment environments.
1. Data based upon Frost and Sullivan’s 2014 Global Media and Entertainment Video Transcoding Market report. Using average cost per server ($6200) and dividing by average cost per stream ($1119) resulting in an average of 5.54 streams per rack unit.
