VITA 46.11 defines a chassis management architecture for OpenVPX that provides automated oversight and administration tools, which serve to provide better insights into a system’s health. As more intelligent monitoring functions are implemented into OpenVPX applications, the need to properly enable smooth system operation and resource management becomes more important.
A Chassis Manager has three primary functions to help keep systems healthy, manage system power and ensure proper cooling (Figure 1):
Other components of a chassis management system include the IMPI, or Intelligent Platform Management Interface, which manages and monitors system capabilities independently of the host system, and the corresponding IPMB, or Intelligent Management Interface Bus that facilitates system management and IMPC, Intelligent Management Interface Controller designed to help manage the system.
Layers of Management Functionality VITA 46.11 also defines two tiers of functionality for the chassis manager and the IPMC to enable implementation flexibility. Tier 1 is the easiest to implement, while Tier 2 provides the highest functionality (Tier 3 is in development).
Chassis managers – as defined in VITA 46.11 – now enable the system designer to find faults before any defects negatively impact the individual board or the entire system; correctly implemented, the chassis manager also can help maintain power levels and reduce overall downtime. Monitoring the health, power and cooling of VPX boards used across military applications, including radar, electronic warfare (EW), communications, sensor processing, etc., is just as important as keeping an eye on the performance and capability of the end system.
When Tier 3 is available, it will also provide reconfigurability for faster redeployment and health monitoring in the event that elements of the chassis start to fail. This becomes even more important as open standards initiatives – such as the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Technical Standard – are making chassis managers a requirement.
During development of the SOSA Technical Standard, Consortium members worked together to introduce VITA 46.11 to power supply modules. This was because SOSA requires monitoring of the power supplies for reporting and control. The result is that chassis managers now have the capability to monitor power supplies within a chassis thanks to contributions from the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Consortium to the VITA 62 standard. So, although SOSA was pushing for power supplies to support 46.11, VITA 62.0 is where this is actually implemented.
In addition to power supplies now accepting commands from the chassis manager, a smart board is contained within VPX power supplies, so the PSU can interface with the chassis manager via the IPMB, providing even better oversight of system resources.
Want to learn more about VPX chassis management and how it relates to SOSA initiatives? Download the white paper ”Chassis Managers: Monitoring Chassis Health and OpenVPX and SOSA Aligned Boards in Military Systems“
Looking back we can now see a shift in how development platforms are designed and how they are used by our integrator customer base. That shift is making it easier and less expensive to perform the development stages of a deployable system project and put solutions into the hands of the warfighter faster than ever before. Development hardware can also be shared between projects, or inherited by subsequent projects. This saves not only on lab budget, but the time to order and receive all new hardware for a new development project.
In the past few years, several end-of-life (EOL) announcements in the embedded computing market have both caused angst and opportunity. Making the shift away from a tried-and-true solution always brings with it the need to review not only the mechanical elements of an embedded system, but the integration and networking elements as well. And when that review is forced upon a designer, as in the case of an EOL announcement, it may mean forced choices of not-as-optimum alternatives. Or it could be something different altogether.