If there is one thing that’s important in VoIP deployment these days it’s scalability. Now that VoIP is being deployed, I keep hearing huge customer number projections. Cable companies and Vonage are all in the hundreds of thousands of VoIP users already and AOL has the potential to be in the millions. These are staggering numbers and require a new breed of product to deal with massive roll out numbers that are potential in the world of VoIP.
I recently met with Brooktrout and IBM to discuss how Brooktrout’s SnowShore division is working wit IBM to make shore they can sell a solution to allow service providers to scale quickly, inexpensively and reliably.
SnowShore’s IP Media Server is in release 1.3 and comes prepackaged on IBM’s BladeCenter. This is not the run of the mill BladeServer used in any business; it is a NEBs compliant version. The Media Server contains all the bells and whistles such as a VoiceXML interpreter, a SIP protocol interpreter and a media processing engine. You can also interoperate with commercial gateways from Sonus, Cisco and Cedarpoint.
Using an IBM HS20 server allows 7,000 media sessions per server. Another option is to put your application software and provisioning on the server as well to minimize space requirements. The blades can support multiple operating systems as needed and they all communicate via Ethernet in the backbone.
This is important because IBM has shown they are very serious about the telco market and are positioning their NEBs compliant BladeServer as the infrastructure for a telco in a box. Brooktrout has done a good job of partnering with IBM early on.
