Breakthrough integrated HPI for leading ATCA shelf manager

The folks at Pigeon Point Systems, a leading provider of TCA management components and a wholly owned subsidiary of Actel Corporation, have introduced their new IntegralHPI, an innovative implementation of the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) that can be installed as an integrated subsystem of the company's Shelf Manager.

Tested last month at the PICMG TCA Interoperability Workshop (TCA-IW) in Straubenhardt, Germany, IntegralHPI was shown to enable HPI accessibility to a fully loaded AdvancedTCA(R) (ATCA) shelf within seconds after startup, minimizing the time until manageability for high-functionality shelves.

"Enea included the Pigeon Point OpenHPI in version 2.0 of the Enea Accelerator Platform, an industry-proven, off-the-shelf software foundation for the development of carrier-grade next generation equipment. The dramatic improvements the new IntegralHPI from Pigeon Point can offer would further strengthen our next-generation platforms, especially in the initial discovery time for large ATCA shelf configurations," said Terry Pearson, vice president of marketing at Enea. "With the preservation of the binary interface for OpenHPI client applications and support for redundancy, IntegralHPI is a very attractive alternative to existing solutions."

The HPI is emerging as a strongly favored foundation layer among major Network Equipment Providers for management layers that monitor systems based on ATCA and other types of hardware platforms. Defined by the Service Availability Forum (SAF), the HPI provides an abstracted interface for managing computer hardware, including bladed shelf/chassis architectures, such as ATCA and IBM BladeCenter.

"Our tier one Network Equipment Provider customers and their suppliers are increasingly focused on using HPI as the foundation interface for management access to their ATCA shelves, so it makes sense for us to add HPI as a native interface of the market-leading Pigeon Point Shelf Manager," said Mark Overgaard, president of Pigeon Point. "IntegralHPI preserves the gains in robustness and specification compliance that have already been delivered to those customers in Pigeon Point OpenHPI, but in a significantly more efficient implementation and with other advancements, such as inherent support for redundancy."

IntegralHPI is supported on the large memory configuration of the Pigeon Point ShMM-500R Shelf Manager that manages the majority of the world's ATCA shelves. As a subsystem of the Shelf Manager, IntegralHPI provides substantial improvements over Pigeon Point's OpenHPI, an optimized distribution of an external open-source HPI implementation. By tightly integrating its operation with the Shelf Manager, IntegralHPI is dramatically more efficient, with initial startup times for richly populated ATCA shelves that ranged from 29x to 53x faster than the Pigeon Point OpenHPI solution with less than half the memory requirements.

In addition, IntegralHPI leverages the Shelf Manager's proven redundancy architecture to deliver an HPI service that is un-interrupted across Shelf Manager switchovers. IntegralHPI also directly reuses source code from the Pigeon Point OpenHPI product, especially for the numerous additional sensors and controls that are required by the SAF's HPI-to-ATCA mapping specification. In addition, IntegralHPI preserves the binary interface used by OpenHPI client applications to access the HPI service, simplifying the transition to IntegralHPI for current OpenHPI users.

Availability
The new IntegralHPI is delivered on a subscription basis and will be available in Q4 2008. Technical support is provided by Pigeon Point's ATCA and HPI experts.