SUN DELIVERS NEW COMPACT PCI PRODUCTS GIVING OEMS A MODULAR APPROACH TO BUILDING CARRIER GRADE SOLUTIONS.

Responding to the growing demand for fast-to-market telecom and Internet products and services, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) has introduced new board products that continue delivery of Sun's CP2000 high availability (HA) initiative of enabling communications and network equipment providers to build customized highly-available, carrier-grade systems. Unveiled at the GSM World Congress, the Netra CP2040, CP2060 and CP2080 CompactPCI (cPCI) board-level products enable rapid deployment of network infrastructure to give NEPs complete end-to-end solutions that delivers continuous uptime for their customers.

In the telecom, wireless and service provider space, a scalable architecture is needed to meet ever-changing market demands. To quickly add new services, extend existing ones and add more users, companies need a scalable hardware and software infrastructure. The current trend is toward rackmount solutions, where board-based services can be quickly added and deployed.

As an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partner, Sun delivers carrier-grade network server platforms based on the Solaris Operating Environment and Chorus real-time Operating System that meet the demands for continuous uptime, massive scalability and an integrated hardware and software stack around which customers can quickly construct high-availability systems to meet existing and future needs.

The Netra CP2040 is a universal cPCI board designed to function as a system controller, an alternate system controller or a non-system slot board for the CP2000 platform. The Netra CP2060 and CP2080 boards offer customers flexible non-system slot I/O solutions for satellite processing. These boards are designed for use in both the wireless and wireline network infrastructure and can be used to build BSC, MSC, IP telephony, softswitch and media gateway platforms as well as GPRS, ATM, cross connect and optical switching solutions.

Both cPCI board offerings incorporate essential redundancy features, including hot swap, dual ethernet and Intelligent Peripheral Management Interface (IPMI) signaling support. With the Netra CP2040 and Netra CP2060/80 products, Sun is introducing support for PCI Mezzanine Cards (PMC), which will allow customers to build higher density solutions. In addition, the boards support Sun Management Center software, which provides system-level monitoring and management and is designed to increase service levels and lower the total cost of operation.

"The release of Netra CP2040 and CP2060 represents Sun's entrance into the rest of the rack," said Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "It also solidifies our foothold in this market by expanding our scalable UltraSPARC architecture by offering a board for every slot."

The entire CP2000 platform combines Sun's UltraSPARC IIe processor and a choice of either the Solaris Operating Environment or ChorusOS real-time operating system. Solaris is the UNIX operating system of choice because of its proven 64-bit environment. The Solaris 8 Operating Environment supports advanced HA requirements, including dynamic reconfiguration and alternate pathing to ensure optimal availability.

ChorusOS real-time operating system is highly scalable and reliable and designed for the embedded marketplace. It provides the ideal platform to best exploit the capabilities of Sun's cPCI hardware in embedded products, with real-time performance and the support of high availability features like the hot swap of boards. Together, the Chorus and Solaris operating systems provide the foundation for building next-generation carrier grade solutions. Leveraging common APIs, they permit carriers to cover a large spectrum of needs, from switching to computing with solutions, complementing Sun's cPCI framework.