MERA Systems Inc. (Booth 350) is making available its new fully distributed session-
controller architecture. The new architecture has been purpose-built for large telcos such as Tier 1, major national and international carriers and delivers enhanced scalability, reliability and simplified management of VoIP networks.
MERA provides a fully distributed session controller solution that delivers "five 9s" reliability, along with other benefits critical for a top-tier service provider. The MERA MVTS session controller consists of several interconnected signaling and media servers. The signaling servers share a single routing table and can efficiently manage VoIP traffic throughout the entire network, regardless of their location, according to Mera.
The clustered architecture of MERA's session controller allows a capacity increase up to 40,000 concurrent calls. The solution scales by adding extra servers, and is significantly cheaper than several single-server session controllers put together for the same capacity, says Mera.
"MERA's distributed session controller is a highly efficient tool for providing high-quality termination, origination and wholesale services to our customers throughout the country," says Luigi Ghirardi, technical director at Infotel Communication. "The convenient architecture of MERA enables us to keep our network simple and easily manageable, ensuring fast and easy rollout of new services. With MERA's solution we can grow our network in no time. Adding an extra server to the current configuration will take less than five minutes, increasing capacity by 1,500 concurrent calls. Along with its feature-rich functionality and ready scalability, MERA's MVTS has saved us a lot of money. For instance, deployment of back-to-back gateways would have cost us from100 percent to 200 percent, depending on the functionalities needed, and the management overhead would mean a further increase of approximately 30 percent per year. Furthermore, a distributed and "clustered" solution is even more cost-effective Ñ it's the economy of scale that is at work here. The bigger your capacity, the more you gain, which is not always the case with multiple single-box units," says Ghirardi.
