What is the benifit of ATCA besides reliability?

Question

We are a small team going to build a Video Manager System. It get videos from IP camera and store them on storage. It also distribute live video and video record on user demand.

It's not a very complicated system but we are trying to make it support more than 500 IP camera.

One of my colleague fervently suggest we should use ATCA instead of using blade servers, because ATCA is "for the next generation of carrier grade communications equipment" and will make our system looks very cool.

We consulted some ATCA manufactures and we found it is very very expensive but the typical processor blades is even less powerful than common blade server.

So my question is, what is the benifit of ATCA besides reliability? Does carrier companies only buy them only because they could run longer than common servers?

Answer 1

• They have good redundancy and monitoring features. These are designed for five 9's (99.999%) reliability
• They have a 10 Gb ("fabric") and 1 G ("base") Ethernet on the backplane; great for high inter-blade traffic.
• They are available from more than one vendor, and you can mix and match blades.
• ATCA blades are often supported for many years, including spares availability. Not all blade servers are that way.