OCEANSIDE, California, February 7, 2011 – Pigeon Point Systems, LLC, the leading independent supplier of hardware platform management solutions for xTCA™ (including AdvancedTCA® or ATCA) is now delivering two separate implementations of the Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) for use with its market-leading Pigeon Point Shelf Manager and complying with the latest HPI-to-xTCA mapping specification. The Hardware Platform Interface (HPI) and the HPI-to-xTCA mapping specifications are defined by the Service Availability Forum™ (SA Forum – www.saforum.org). HPI provides an abstracted interface for managing computer hardware and the mapping specification provides implementation-independent guidance for applying that abstraction to the sophisticated hardware platform management framework of ATCA. Using a common HPI mapping for managing ATCA platforms minimizes the development to support new platforms and maximizes the leverage for customers who use HPI to access their managed platforms. The 2010 revision of the xTCA specification takes advantage of years of industry experience with the original 2005 revision and substantial concurrent maturation of the xTCA hardware platform management architecture. Pigeon Point was an active leader in PICMG’s management evolutions and in the development of the new SA Forum mapping specification during this period.
IntegralHPI™ implements HPI as a subsystem of the market-leading Pigeon Point Shelf Manager that manages the majority of the world’s ATCA shelves. Operating as part of the Shelf Manager, IntegralHPI provides substantial improvements over Pigeon Point’s OpenHPI, an optimized distribution of an external open-source HPI implementation. IntegralHPI is dramatically more efficient, with initial startup times for richly populated ATCA shelves that range 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. Furthermore, IntegralHPI preserves the binary interface used by OpenHPI client applications to access the HPI service, simplifying the transition to IntegralHPI for current OpenHPI users or the concurrent use of both OpenHPI and IntegralHPI for complex configurations including both ATCA and non-ATCA platforms.
OpenHPI (www.openhpi.org) is an open source implementation of HPI that includes a plug-in architecture to simplify and modularize the support of disparate hardware platforms, including several plug-ins that support generic IPMI-managed platforms specific vendor lines like blade servers from HP.
Pigeon Point OpenHPI benefits from the broad use of OpenHPI across a wide variety of hardware platforms, plus intensive validation and use on the ATCA platforms of major Pigeon Point customers. Pigeon Point has invested many person-years of development in the Pigeon Point plug-in to tune the interactions with the Pigeon Point Shelf Manager, comply with the HPI-to-xTCA Mapping specification and meet other demanding customer requirements. Pigeon Point’s corrections and enhancements to OpenHPI outside the Pigeon Point plug-in are being published back to the OpenHPI open source project and many of them have already been integrated into the current OpenHPI source code. In fact, Pigeon Point developers contribute actively in the OpenHPI project.
The SA Forum has recently posted a webcast recorded by Pigeon Point’s Mark Overgaard that introduces the concepts and benefits of HPI (www.saforum.org/HOA/assn16627/images/HPI%20Webc[…]). A Pigeon Point HPI User Guide for both current Pigeon Point HPI products is available on the library page of the Pigeon Point website (www.pigeonpoint.com/library.html) along with corresponding documentation for the Pigeon Point Shelf Manager. Also accessible via that page are useful articles and tutorials on hardware platform management.
For additional information on these and other Pigeon Point products, visit www.pigeonpoint.com; further queries are welcome via email at [email protected].
About Pigeon Point
Pigeon Point Systems LLC delivers world-class management components for modular platforms based on the AdvancedTCA, AdvancedMC and MicroTCA architectures to leading companies worldwide. Pigeon Point’s focus on providing dependable, proven solutions for the mandatory management controllers in these architectures allows customers to concentrate on the value-added aspects of their products. Deep expertise on these architectures ensures compliance and interoperability in the Pigeon Point components.
Pigeon Point, an executive member of PICMG, is a leader in its AdvancedTCA®, AdvancedMC®, and MicroTCA™ subcommittees and is active in many other technical subcommittees. Pigeon Point is also a member of VITA and participates actively in its VITA 46.11 working group, which is defining a management architecture for VPX and OpenVPX. In addition, Pigeon Point is a contributing member of the Service Availability Forum and a leader in its HPI Working Group. For more information on Pigeon Point Systems, visit www.pigeonpoint.com.
Pigeon Point and the stylized lighthouse logo, as well as IntegralHPI, are trademarks of Pigeon Point Systems. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.