SPECsip_Infrastructure2011 has been released by Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC). The performance of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) servers can be now evaluated with a new benchmark, SPECsip_Infrastructure2011.

IBM (News - Alert), Intel, Oracle and Red Hat are members of the SPEC SIP subcommittee. Shay Gal-On of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmarking Consortium (EEMBC) has provided the supporting contributions.

A VoIP deployment for an enterprise, telco or service provider modeled on a proxy server is the basis of SPECsip_Infrastructure2011. The typical behavior of users sending and receiving SIP traffic is emulated by clients within the SPECsip_Infrastructure2011 workload. Studies by Communigate Systems and IBM are the basis for the user behavior patterns. The simultaneous number of supported subscribers is measured by the primary metric for SPECsip_Infrastructure. At the same time, several quality of service (QoS) requirements are also met.

Developers, testers, performance analysts and purchasing decision-makers are expected to be using the new benchmark. Performance of server products can be evaluated and improved by SIP software vendors using the new benchmark. The benchmark will also allow hardware vendors to determine the servers’ capability of handling VoIP workloads. According to SPEC SIP subcommittee chair Erich Nahum, SPECsip_Infrastructure2011 can benefit users in multiple ways. According to Nahum, comparing performance of computing SIP servers in a VoIP environment is the primary benefit for users.

In a release, Nahum said, "Comparisons can be made through results posted on the SPEC web site, by users running the benchmark as is, or by users customizing the benchmark workload to better match their local environments. In addition to performance comparisons, the benchmark is a great tool for optimizing server provisioning."

SIP applications and the Java SIP container will be the focus of the future releases from the SPEC SIP subcommittee. Further information about SPECsip_Infrastructure2011 is available at http://www.spec.org/sipinf2011/.

Standardized benchmarks are established, maintained and endorsed by SPEC. More than 70 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies across the world are members of SPEC.

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