If you are a telecom equipment manufacturer or a system integrator for highly available platforms, you may always be looking for ways to ensure interoperability with other vendors and conformance to PICMG standards. For ATCA hardware management, you are in luck. CP-TA has taken a number of steps to help you. The group has developed an Interoperability Compliance Document (ICD) and a Test Procedure Manual (TPM), as well as validated the ATCA Manageability Tester from Polaris Networks as an authorized test tool for compliance and certification testing. With these steps in place, you now know you have a benchmark that can be used in your lab to test for compliance and interoperability before products hit the market.

How about interoperability testing for the MicroTCA platform and for AMC modules? Here, Polaris Networks has taken the lead in creating an ICD and a TPM. It has also developed automated Manageability Test Tools based on these ICD and TPM documents. A natural next step for the CP-TA community will be to review and validate these ICD and TPM documents for MicroTCA and AMC. This will be followed by validation of the available test tools. Such reviews and validation will continue to build momentum for compliance and certification testing that is required to deliver the promise of low-cost COTS components.

Going beyond testing the management software in the hardware platform, CP-TA is actively liaising with the Service Availability Forum on testing the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) and eventually middleware software such as Platform Management (PLM) and other AIS (Application Interface Specification) Services. The SA Forum developed an HPI Tester based on the SAI-HPI-B.01.01 HPI Specification. Polaris Networks also has an HPI Tester that includes tests for newer HPI functions (based on SAI-HPI-B.03.01 and SAI-HPI-B.02.01) and for HPI-to-ATCA Mapping based on the SAIM-HPI-B01.01-ATCA specification.

Check out the demo videos of the Polaris Networks test tools for MicroTCA, AMC and HPI Testing. You can also ask for free evaluation copies of these test tools.