CommuniGate Pro 5.0 SIP Farm

Yesterday, I had a conference call with CommuniGate Systems, a developer of scalable carrier-class IP-based communications solutions, about their impending launch of its new SIP Farm, which was just launched today. SIP Farm runs on their CommuniGate Pro Dynamic Cluster application server platform, which they claim is the only SIP technology that offers "clustering" for not only high-scalability but also fault tolerance. The technology enables large scale deployments of SIP-based VoIP to telco-level capacities. The multi-node, all-active SIP Farm technology makes it possible to host millions of subscribers with either a consolidated cluster or distributed geographic placement of cluster members while also claiming a 99.999 percent uptime.

According to CommuniGate Systems, "CommuniGate Pro 5.0 SIP Farm removes all barriers to adoption of SIP as a standard, making it possible to scale to tens of millions of subscribers with redundant signalling. The complex nature of real-time communications has strained the database-centric architectures of the past. Carriers have found it hard to manage systems not designed for the sheer load that IM presence status information and multiple end-points per user on the system."

In the CommuniGate Pro Dynamic Cluster, SIP requests are distributed across all (or a subset of all) frontend servers. SIP presents challenges (compared to email protocols) for clustering and NAT traversal as most signalling and media traffic occurs in UDP-based sessions. Many vendors attempt to manage sessions through complex and expensive switching and SBCs or by using database-limited state tracking. CommuniGate Pro's SIP Farm technology presents providers a method of scaling system capacity and redundancy by adding additional nodes to the cluster, aligning infrastructure costs to business revenue with as-needed capacity growth.

"We're introducing technology today that eliminates the pains of scaling SIP technology for sites with tens of millions of subscribers. The lack of redundancy or susceptibility to signalling failure is the result of limited architectural approaches in most SIP systems," stated Thom O'Connor, Director, Product Architecture CommuniGate Systems. "With CommuniGate Pro SIP Farm, redundancy and capacity is expanded in one or even multiple locations acting as a single cluster, with the ability to add or remove nodes from the cluster and providing immediate re-allocation of sessions in the event of system failure. All of this is driven by standards-based SIP as an Internet-ready mode of communication, where every user's address is available for end-to-end email, IM, voice, and video."

CommuniGate Pro 5.0 SIP Farm allows providers to sustain a million busy-hour call attempts and call rates of over 300 calls per second on each cluster frontend member.The SIP Farm provides a large cluster capable of call rates of tens of millions of BHCAs, while providing innate resilience in case of system or even site failure. Using a geographic deployment of the CommuniGate Pro Dynamic Cluster SIP Farm will allow providers to place systems in various locations or countries and have those members remain as part of a single cluster image for identity management, provisioning, and ease-of-administration. SIP Farm brings to VoIP what the Dynamic Cluster brings to email - unsurpassed scalability and capacity, as evidenced by CommuniGate Pro's world-record setting SPECmail benchmark records at spec.org (SPEC and the benchmark name SPECmail are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation).

CommuniGate Pro 5.0, based on open SIP standards, allows users a choice of clients - IP phones, soft clients, traditional telephony, mobile devices, browsers, and IM agents - all through the same access and login. Traditional telephone numbers will still be used through PSTN connectivity or ENUM. CommuniGate Pro 5.0 can route to multiple simultaneous gateways, including IP-to-PSTN and IP-to-IP, PSTN-to-IP, and even PSTN-to-PSTN between switches using SIP. Ultimately, with CommuniGate Pro 5.0 all users can choose their own choice of client for email, collaboration, and voice and still interoperate with one another.