So, what does it mean to be cloud-ready? Well, that depends on the application. In the case of Commetrex’s (News - Alert) BladeWare, it means the platform must be robust and capable of handling heavy loads, otherwise, nothing else matters. But it goes well beyond that.
BladeWare is a telephony platform widely deployed in hosted- and premises-based fax applications, including enterprise fax servers and hosted fax-to-email and email-to-fax. When it comes down to core functions the platform must provide to those applications, there’s no real difference between the two. But, for the Cloud, the requirements go well beyond the core media functions since cloud or hosted applications have a way of magnifying requirements. So, instead of 4-24-port systems you find 100-200-port systems. And, instead of a simple operator interface, cloud-based applications put a heavy emphasis on manageability, serviceability, scalability, and flexible metering/accounting, so subscribers can be accurately billed.
In the case of BladeWare, we meet these requirements by leveraging BladeWare’s distributed client-server architecture. In addition to the applications, the system includes eight different processes, such as the SIP service manager, the authentication server, the connection manager, and the admin facility, with the latter being responsible for managing the other processes.
The admin facility is responsible for bringing these processes into and out of execution and managing their operational level from configurable (level 1) to applications taking calls (level 5). In addition, the admin implements the system’s configuration management, fault management, security management, and accounting. Of course, all this is done remotely via a Web browser or an SNMP client. There is also an open interface, allowing OEMs to add their proprietary interface.
With BladeWare, serviceability means that optional entities can be brought in and out of service without disturbing the balance of the system. This means supporting both graceful and immediate shutdown. It also means dynamic system configurability, operational monitoring, and self diagnostics.
Scalability means being able to increase the system capacity without taking the system down. This is a simple configuration change as long as the compute resources of the host aren’t exceeded. But, because of the system’s distributed architecture, call capacity can be seamlessly increased simply by adding more computers. In blade-based systems, which is where we got the name, BladeWare, this means sliding in another board.
For metering and status monitoring, BladeWare uses the admin facility’s ability to monitor the statistics collected by each process. Customer-facing processes include the SIP service manager and the fax resource controller. There is also a client-application API that allows the user’s billing application to query the processes directly.
So, cloud-based call-processing systems extend the requirements of enterprise-based systems to support the additional requirements for
System capacity and scalability,
Manageability,
Serviceability, and
Metering.
To find out more about Commetrex visit the company at ITEXPO West 2012 to be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX. Visit Commetrex in booth 722.
Edited by Juliana Kenny