US : Catapult Communications announced a new p250 platform for the DCT2000 and MGTS test systems. The p250 platform targets an even broader range of telecom test environments and applications and meets an increasing demand for transportable, desktop and rack mount form factors. The p250 is available for order now.

According to Kalyan Sundhar, Catapult Vice President of Engineering, "The new p250 platform will enable us to meet the needs of our customers for flexibility in implementing telecom test solutions. The p250 can function as a desktop, transportable or rack mount platform. The shoebox industrial chassis will allow our customers to easily move their DCT2000 and MGTS systems from one test site to another. This chassis will be attractive to customers who are looking for a price, performance and form factor that's fully adaptable to their network test installations."

The Catapult p250 chassis utilizes the Catapult PowerPCI® architecture to support up to 4 network interface cards. The p250, only 10"(W) x 17"(D) x 7"(H), can be vertically or horizontally mounted, and easily fit into space limited environments. First p250 customer shipments include a dual-core processor, a wide range of network interface cards, including Gigabit Ethernet, and a 550-Watt power supply capable of supporting the most demanding test environments. The p250 is fully transportable, weighs only 20.9 lbs. (9.5 kg) and has two adjustable positions for the hold-down card retainers providing better protection from vibration.

The p250 is an added choice to Catapult's test platform portfolio. The existing 18-slot m500 platform delivers unprecedented load test performance by using an industry standard mesh backplane that allows the physical test interface to be driven by one or many mesh computing unit cards. The 9-slot p400 platform, like the p250, utilizes the PCI bus architecture and is ideal for functional, conformance and interoperability testing. Unmatched in flexibility and scalability, these Catapult platforms meet the needs for testing different stages in the product life cycle, different test environments, and different network technologies.