n-Share: High Availability, Scalability and Load Management

New for 2012, n-Share is NetSapiens’ revolutionary architecture for reliability, resiliency and load management.

Overview

Part of NetSapiens’ SNAPsolution, n-Share is a geo-distributed real-time service delivery mesh, and the first service provider solution to enable truly geo-distributed and resilient voice, video and multi-media services.  It allows two or more SNAPswitch servers located in geographically diverse data-centers to act as a single unit.   The solution is based on a robust inter module messaging system that allows service delivery components to reliably subscribe to and receive events over inherently unpredictable networks such as the public Internet.

Better High Availability

Unlike other high-availability or n+1 redundancy schemes, which rely on a primary and failover node, the n-Share system can provide identical service across multiple locations in real-time.  And, with seamless and transparent failover between nodes, service disruptions can be avoided as customer connections are automatically transferred to any remaining nodes available.

This means that a voicemail can be left on a West Coast feature server, and retrieved on a paired East Coast server immediately, even if the West Coast server is no longer available.  It also means that feature options (such as call-forwarding or other * codes) take effect across all servers immediately, regardless of the distance between the servers.

Efficient Scalability

As network traffic grows, capacity can be added by deploying additional n-Share nodes. Newly added nodes are added to the n-Share mesh and automatically become available to share call processing tasks across all nodes.

Where other high-availability schemes require the use of active and standby servers (with the standby servers left idle in readiness for a problem) n-Share creates efficiencies by dynamically distributing load across all available servers. Savings are realized because peak hour capacity needs can be shared between nodes, thereby increasing flexibility and reducing the total server requirement across all nodes.

Optimized Quality of Service

An additional benefit of the n-Share architecture is that load can be dynamically shared across all connected nodes based on geographic distance from the user.  Especially in cases where media-anchoring is required, this optimizes quality of service by ensuring voice and video payload will take the shortest path between the sender and receiver.

Mobile workers are now adopting SIP clients running over 3G and 4G wireless networks, where network conditions are often unpredictable. As a result, the ability to maximize quality of service in a scalable and reliable way is becoming more important than ever.

Conclusion

NetSapiens n-Share is poised to raise the bar for high-availability systems. With n-Share, service providers can finally fulfill the five 9s promise that has so far eluded conventional high-availability solutions.