Product category: CompactPCI Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Pigeon Point Systems | Subject: IPM Sentry ShMM-500
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 22 March 2005

Upgrade for cPCI shelf management

Pigeon Point Systems has released the next generation of its successful IPM Sentry Shelf Management Mezzanine (ShMM) product line

Known as the IPM Sentry ShMM-500, it offers a dramatic performance boost over the market-leading ShMM-300 to provide faster shelf and board startup and event processing, more responsive interaction with external system managers and the capacity to host layered applications. The ShMM-500 is a member of Pigeon Point Systems' IPM Sentry family of hardware and software products that enable cost-effective, interoperable management of open modular platforms based on the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) standard.

Using IPM Sentry components, developers of AdvancedTCA and CompactPCI products can quickly and efficiently incorporate compliant, competitive and interoperable management solutions.

More than 45 companies around the world, including Motorola and Sun Microsystems, are already taking advantage of IPM Sentry components at the shelf level, board level or both.

Using the new MIPS-32 based AMD Alchemy Au1550 SoC, the ShMM-500 boasts a 7x CPU speed enhancement, 4x SDRAM capacity boost and 2x Flash capacity increase, compared with the ShMM-300.

In addition, the ShMM-500 includes hardware and firmware support for reliable remote upgrades to its firmware.

When this feature is configured, if a firmware upgrade attempt fails, hardware automatically falls back to a redundant copy of the firmware.

The ShMM-500, with its SO-DIMM form-factor, is fully backward-compatible with the ShMM-300 and can be used as a drop-in replacement in existing systems.

The ShMM-500's small size and low power dissipation of less than 5W means that it can be mounted in a number of locations and orientations within a subrack.

'Sun is taking an aggressive approach in developing and deploying an advanced ATCA blade server offering, leveraging our successful cPCI and cPSB Netra products', said Raju Penumatcha, Vice President of Netra Systems and Networking (NSN), Sun Microsystems.

'Pigeon Point Systems' industry-leading ShMM technology ensures that we can deliver widely used, compliant and interoperability-tested shelf management facilities'.

'The dramatically increased capacity of the ShMM-500 allows it to host our standards-based Managed Object Hierarchy software, creating a redundant, highly reliable ATCA system management architecture that reduces operation, administration and maintenance (OAM) development costs and time to market'.

'The introduction of this higher performance shelf manager demonstrates the benefits of having an ecosystem of innovative companies collaborating around industry standards such as AdvancedTCA', said John Fryer, Director of Marketing, Embedded Communications Computing Group, Motorola.

'These companies provide key building blocks for our application-enabling platforms that give leading telecom equipment manufacturers faster time-to-market, lower cost and investment protection for their next-generation products'.

For new designs, the ShMM-500 enables additional features such as Ethernet connections to both redundant AdvancedTCA base hub boards in a shelf, resulting in better availability for the shelf manager function.

Like all the IPM Sentry ShMM products, the ShMM-500 is also available in an IPM Sentry Shelf Management Starter Kit to help OEMs integrate ShMM technology into their own shelves.

The starter kit includes schematics, bench-top hardware and complete product support to build ShMM-500-based AdvancedTCA Shelf Managers to suit specific applications and shelf designs.

OEM 1000-unit pricing for the ShMM-500 is $350.

The starter kit is priced at $5000.

Production deliveries of the ShMM-500 are scheduled for late Q1 2005.

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