Over the last three years, software developers have shifted much of their development attention from using proprietary APIs and operating-specific drivers to using standard open protocols. SIP seems to be a favorite as it offers a well defined call control mechanism, is open enough to accomplish advanced media control and enables enhanced services like IVR and conferencing applications. Creating applications around SIP enables a layer of abstraction for developers that creates “black box” functionality for network interfaces and media processing elements. In a SIP environment, media gateways provide the connectivity to the PSTN and media servers provide the media processing resources.
softswitch architecture
While this architecture is ideal for software developers, it leads to some serious challenges for system integrators and others responsible for turning a whiteboard design into a product. With separate chassis for the application server, media gateway and media server platforms, consider the integration and product challenges:
- How will I ship all of these chassis to my customer?
- During installation, how do I make sure all the cabling and interfacing is done correctly?
- How are all the individual chassis configured?
- Will the configuration be one-stop or does each unit need a separate configuration?
- Who’s brand name is on the various chassis?
- How do I stop my customers from sourcing the components on their own?
- What if one of the branded boxes competes with my application elsewhere in the market?
As you can imagine, these challenges have made integrators think hard about using a multi-vendor and multi-chassis solution.
The solution to many of these challenges are the board-level products offered by AudioCodes. The TP-260 PCI form factor and TP-1610 cPCI product are unique in the market as they offer all the functionality of a stand-alone media gateway, but are delivered in a single board form factor.
Acting as a stand-alone network element, these boards can operate in a mode where they take all their command and control via standard protocols (like SIP) using the on-board Ethernet interfaces. This eliminates the standard PCI control interface and avoids any operating system-specific device drivers. These boards literally take only power and cooling from the chassis.
With these unique board-level products, system integrators can now build appliance-like applications in traditional PC-servers, leveraging normally unused PCI slots to host a TP-260 media gateway, completely eliminating a separate chassis for the gateway.
Using this approach, system integrators can now deliver SIP-based applications to customers in an “appliance-like” single package, simplifying the installation and management. This eliminates the multi-vendor confusion from a stack of different color chassis.
As an added bonus, because the media gateway is delivered in a board form-factor, it costs less. As it shares the chassis and power supply with the application server, the final system cost is usually dramatically reduced.
The combination of board-level media gateways hosted in application servers solves a number of challenges for system integrators and reduces costs. Is it time to take a look at your application and consider using boards?