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At VoiceCon held in Orlando, Datacom Systems (News - Alert), a manufacturer of data capture infrastructure, announced that it is showcasing its VoIP solutions, which provide a secure, reliable, and scalable platform to support VoIP monitoring and recording applications.

“As VoIP has matured and become more mainstream, the need to monitor the performance has grown,” said Chris Koeneman (News - Alert), vice president of Sales and Marketing for Datacom. “Unfortunately most customers rely on SPAN ports to provide the basis of their analysis.  While SPAN ports were adequate when VoIP deployments were modest and experimental, SPAN ports are not suitable for most VoIP deployments today.”

“Datacom Systems' data capture infrastructure, by contrast, offers a flexible and purpose-built architecture that efficiently connects any and all VoIP monitoring tools to the network,” Koeneman added.

Datacom Systems traffic capture solutions enable all kinds of VoIP monitoring tools - packet analyzers, performance monitors, and call recording devices - to receive exactly the traffic they need to perform their tasks.  The economic advantage of VoIP is its ability to ride over a shared network.  But this presents a challenge for monitoring because tools work most efficiently when they are analyzing only the relevant traffic for that tool.  By using Datacom Systems' filtering capabilities, analysis tools operate more efficiently because the VoIP traffic can be isolated at line rate before it hits the analysis tool.

Value added resellers who focus on VoIP are realizing the importance of implementing a purpose-built network for VoIP monitoring.  With a broad set of products and cost-effective filtering at both 1Gbps and 10Gbps, Datacom is the ideal choice.

“Our customers are increasingly relying on Voice over IP,” said Howard Kim, MD of Teledata, a leading solutions provider of VoIP.  “This reliance calls for more sophisticated network monitoring and performance analysis. Teledata selected Datacom Systems to provide the data capture infrastructure for our customers who are deploying VoIP.”

Many network engineers are faced with SPAN ports as their only option for VoIP monitoring and this option usually falls short.  First, most switches have only one or two SPAN ports available for a multitude of monitoring needs.  Compounding the issue, there are many points on the network where voice and data are traveling together; the SPAN ports at these key locations are the cause of serious departmental contention for very limited resources.

Even when a SPAN port is available, it is often used at least a portion of the time for troubleshooting.  SPAN ports also need to be configured, which can be a difficult.  A misconfiguration can result in problems ranging from not getting all the data that is required, to catastrophic network failure.  Finally, switches aren't meant to direct SPAN traffic as their primary function - so if traffic is heavy, switches can experience degraded performance and can drop packets, causing quality of service issues for the entire organization.

Datacom Systems can overcome the difficulties of call recording in a VoIP infrastructure.  Oftentimes the most difficult task is ensuring the necessary voice traffic reaches the correct call recorder.  Datacom Systems traffic capture devices, including the SINGLEstream Link Aggregation Tap and VERSAstream 10-Port Data Access Switch, can direct and filter network traffic through a choice of Aggregation (many-to-any), Regeneration (any-to-many) and Port Steering (any-to-any) connectivity options.

During VoiceCon Orlando 2010, March 22-24, Datacom Systems is displaying its VoIP network traffic capture devices from its exhibit at Booth 1236 in the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center.

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