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Ever since Metaswitch Networks rolled out Perimeta Session Border Control (SBC) software, more than 60 service providers worldwide have been leveraging it to scale SBC capacity and functions on demand, thereby limiting capital expenditures and infrastructure complexity while optimizing the use of SBC licenses.

Until now, Perimeta SBC software was made available for deployment only on generic enterprise servers. Recently, the company announced via a press release that Perimeta is also been made available for deployment on virtual machine environments as well, in order to support elastic cloud computing networks.

With the availability of portable SBC software on enterprise servers, virtual machines and elastic compute clouds, service providers will be able to gain optimal cost-effectiveness in large scale deployments.

In general, a SBCs resides either at the interconnect point between two network providers or at the access boundary between a managed carrier infrastructure and residential or enterprise customers. Some of the key functionalities offered by SBCs include: security, traffic management and accessibility.

Metaswitch’s Perimeta SBC software features flexible architecture that supports independent scaling of an SBC's signaling and media functions. This facilitates service providers to cost-effectively address the signaling-heavy, changing mix of network traffic.

In addition, the Perimeta is offered exclusively on the Metaswitch high availability commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) ATCA platform. It has also been designed to meet the demands of next generation network architectures and emerging rich multimedia communications services.

“Our established approach to building portable SBC software makes it natural to extend Perimeta into cloud-based architectures,” said Martin Taylor, CTO for Metaswitch, in a statement. “By architecting our solution for massively parallel operation on multi-core CPUs, network operators can now, for the first time, leverage COTS server farms to initiate virtual SBC capacity on demand. This is a highly efficient use of shared compute resources and mirrors the software-defined network trend of moving control plane software into elastic compute clouds.”

Currently available to run on various hypervisors, Perimeta will enable large operators to take advantage of private elastic cloud environments to scale SBC functions completely independently of dedicated hardware.

According to the release, Perimeta SBC is currently running live on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The company would be demonstrating Perimeta at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

“Today network operators are investing heavily in data center infrastructure, including server hardware and virtualization software to support growing computing demands,” said Diane Myers, directing analyst of VoIP and IMS at Infonetics (News - Alert), said in a statement. “By allowing operators to scale SBC capacity and functions on demand, Metaswitch is helping to limit capital expenditures and infrastructure complexity while optimizing the use of SBC licenses.”