Artesyn Embedded Technologies announced the Centellis™ 8840, the industry’s most powerful AdvancedTCA® (ATCA®) open-standard server 
system thanks to 160G aggregate bandwidth capacity to each blade today and future 400G to each blade with the ability to support power and cooling for up to 600 watts per blade. Following the company’s recent announcement of the industry’s first 100G ATCA technology, the Centellis 8840 integrates that technology into a NEBS-ready platform that will accept 40G ATCA blades today and 100G blades when they are available. Network equipment providers and carriers developing SDN/NFV network security and optimization, 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.
Artesyn has implemented an innovative QuadStar™ backplane architecture to provide four independent networks supporting up to 400Gbps aggregated bandwidth to every blade. Customers can achieve an aggregated system bandwidth of 1.6 Tb/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 4.0 Tb/s aggregate system bandwidth in a non-redundant implementation using the same chassis and backplane.
Todd Wynia, vice president for communication products, Artesyn Embedded Technologies, said: “Communications service providers are telling us that enterprise switches and servers may not provide a sufficient hardware platform for the deployment of SDN and NFV within the carrier cloud and service provider’s network. So, a platform such as Artesyn’s Centellis 8000 series is required, especially toward the network core where high capacity and high reliability are essential.”
To provide customers with flexible configuration options, Artesyn offers a broad 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 recently announced ATCA-7480 QuadStar packet processing blade based on on two Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v3 family processors providing the highest performance class with up to 28 processing cores per blade.
The Centellis 8840 supports Artesyn’s System Services Framework (SSF) software, a centralized 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 percent 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.
