Last July, CP-TA announced the interoperability levels “Tested,” “Compliant,” and “Certified” as well as the criteria a vendor must pass before it can claim to the industry that its products meet those levels for three areas of interoperability: Thermal, Manageability and Data Transport. At the ATCA Summit in Santa Clara last week, CP-TA authorized its first tool to enable a vendor to achieve the “Compliant” rating for manageability interoperability.

The ATCA Manageability Tester from Polaris Networks is an automated software tool used to test compatibility of an ATCA or AMC building block with respect to hardware platform management requirements of the PICMG3.0 or AMC.0 specification. The ATCA Manageability Tester complements the ICTS as it uses underlying IPMI commands to send messages from the tool to the IPMC under test and checks the requirements of the ATCA spec. It provides a benchmark for testing IPMCs. By using the ATCA Manageability Tester, a vendor can find and fix the basic interoperability issues at the design state, thereby reducing risk of failure in a live scenario.

This is an important milestone for CP-TA and the ATCA ecosystem. In order for the Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) to realize the full benefits of COTS, products must be interoperable so that sourcing from multiple vendors is a viable option.

You can read our white paper on the ATCA Manageability Tester here, and as always we appreciate your comments and feedback.