When forming an elite team to complete a high-level project, you need people who are at the top of their specialty, who function in-synch and who are flexible to respond to any situation. Such a team is highly advanced and well managed. This is the premise behind Advanced Managed Platforms. Generic platforms are comprised of fundamental hardware and low-level software components integrated together to provide the basis to support your specific applications. In contrast, advanced managed platforms employ comprehensive management architecture and a suite of highly compatible components to deliver high availability platforms for equipment manufacturers developing communications, military and commercial products.

The critical components and supporting software necessary in a typical embedded communications application include the platforms with backplane, PICMG® 2.16 Ethernet switches, PICMG 2.9 Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) shelf management, single board computers, IO and communication cards, voice and fax media packet processors and SS7/IP solutions. Components must be developed to work synergistically, offering the most advanced high availability, performance and compatibility. Advanced shelf management maximizes high availability by providing comprehensive and timely information to all active components in the platform (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Advanced Managed Platform Architecture

Even with PICMG 2.16 applications, a unified and advanced platform architecture is critical to ensure compatibility. For example:

• The chassis must be able to power and cool each board properly in a maximum load condition and in extreme temperature conditions.
• It must be designed in concert with the fabric switch to support the Ethernet fabric signals to each slot. Additionally, Advanced Managed Platforms have an IPMI shelf management architecture that is standards-based, reliable and routed to all active components in the platform (including power supplies) and compatible with the redundant intelligent shelf managers.
• The intelligent shelf manager is responsible for managing all intelligent components in the platform and slot control. By implementing a star topology with point-to-point interface from each managed component to the intelligent shelf manager, any rogue components will be isolated and will not be able to control other components in the platform.
• Finally, it is important that the components have been designed and tested for interoperability for your specific configuration. This not only saves the time and money when developing an application, but it ensures the success of the high availability application.

Advanced Managed Platform Attributes

Advanced managed platforms are designed at both the hardware and software level to produce the highest level of availability. All critical components in the platform are designed to support active/active or active/standby operation to support redundancy, which eliminates a single point of failure.

Beyond designing the platforms to have redundant slots for switches, power supplies and system management, the chassis itself is designed for HA. For example, the power inputs of the platforms have isolated and redundant power input feeds. Other platforms tie the two power inputs together using diodes.

Higher performance processor boards typically mean higher power. The new Intel® Pentium® M processors were designed to draw reduced power and are excellent for embedded applications. But they still draw 24W of power on their own. When designed into a single board computer, they can draw up to 50W. When you consider that there are 18 node slots in a 12U platform, fans, switches and intelligent shelf managers, a full load of single-processor boards adds up to 1300W of power! Advanced managed platforms are designed to support 50W per node slot and 70W per fabric slot.

Intelligent Platform Management (IPM) buses are the primary management connection between components in the platform. When installed in a platform, the ISM provides a point-to-point IPMI connection to each individual node or fabric slot, power supplies, fan trays, the redundant ISM and the backplane. The ISM acts as the primary Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) for the entire shelf, blocking any traffic between two points of the star, increasing reliability and security. If any IPMI-based component or subsystem fails and causes its bus to be inoperable, the ISM isolates it from the rest of the IPMI framework (Figure 2).

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