RadiSys Corporation, a global provider of advanced embedded solutions for the communications networking and commercial systems markets, recently announced that its RadiSys Convedia CMS-9000 is the industry’s first media server to offer N+1 Media Processing Card (MPC) redundancy.

 

RadiSys Convedia media servers now come with this fault-tolerant feature, enabling conferencing service providers and enterprises to provide customers with VoIP conferencing services possessing an extremely high level of reliability.

 

RadiSys’ media servers have their roots in a company called Convedia. After Convedia was acquired by RadiSys in 2006, it became the RadiSys Media Service Business Unit. Convedia lives on as a product brand.

 

“We’ve been in the Voice-over-IP industry for a number of years now, and the initial motivation for people to migrate from traditional circuit-switched technology to VoIP concerned economic reasons, bandwidth efficiencies, and so forth,” said Ray Adensamer (News - Alert), senior manager of product marketing at RadiSys’ media server business unit. “What we’re now starting to see is a maturity in the market where it’s going beyond that, into improved reliability of VoIP network components. Specifically, our business unit does a lot of work in the conferencing industry. Nine of the top ten conferencing service providers worldwide use our products, and they’ve deployed those products for the usual economic-related reasons: lower price per port, higher capacities, lower power consumption and less ongoing maintenance.”

 

“But what this release is about is to address service level agreements,” Adensamer continued. “As you can imagine, a conferencing service provider that’s offering a hosted conferencing service has to provide some sort of service level guarantees to customers. This new feature is all about yet again improving the reliability of supporting conference customers. We had system control card redundancy in our product for a number of years now, and this improvement now adds a layer of media processing card redundancy. So, if any one card fails — and an actual failure is a rare event — then the conference as well as all of the participants and all of the parameters that go with it, would be handed over to a standby card. This is a unique capability in the industry. As far as we know, no other media server/conference bridge vendor can do something like this.”

 

“The key benefit is a very obvious one,” Adensamer continued. “There are no dropped conference calls at all. So this is a huge value proposition, especially for our conferencing customers. This is a feature that has been discussed and has been in the planning works for a number of years. There was a major investment that the RadiSys media server business unit did to create this feature and that’s why we’re pretty excited to announce it in the market.”

 

In 2003, RadiSys introduced the industry’s first 1+1 fault-tolerant redundancy across system control cards. This capability allowed a standby System Control Card (SCC) to seamlessly take over from a rare active SCC card failure, without impacting calls in service. Now, with another industry first — N+1 redundancy across media processing cards — conferencing service providers can now offer full redundancy on the carrier-class Convedia CMS-9000 media server.

 

When a rare error or problem is detected on any media processing card within a redundancy group of N cards, all conference participants and associated settings are automatically switched over to a standby media processing card. The hundreds of CSP (News - Alert) customers that would normally be impacted without this feature, regardless of location, will now be unaware that anything has taken place.

 

“RadiSys CSP customers are already achieving significant benefits and cost savings using RadiSys Convedia media servers in their networks. Our new fault-tolerant capabilities further improve the service reliability and differentiation of our customer’s conferencing service offerings in a fast-moving global market,” said David Smith, General Manager — Media Server Business Unit at RadiSys. “Conferencing service providers and enterprises now have an even greater reason to accelerate their migration to next-generation IP service architectures.”

 

The RadiSys Convedia CMS-9000 media server, with full redundancy of all media server system cards, is available today. The feature is also available on the CMS-6000 media server with certain media processing card models.

 

RadiSys Convedia media servers support a broad set of IP media processing features essential for next generation VoIP conferencing applications in CSP and enterprise conferencing environments. The RadiSys Convedia CMS-9000 Media Server delivers high performance and reliability, scalability, and a low total cost of ownership for media-intensive IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) networks and services.

 

These media servers enable fixed mobile convergence by delivering a shared IP media processing resource for any access network, including wireless, broadband, cable, PSTN or satellite. The system’s multi-service versatility enables revenue-generating IMS applications, including multimedia conferencing, IP Centrex, ringback tones, network gaming, video communications, and complex audio/video transcoding.