SIP Director provides an extensive set of features and benefits – many of them specifically designed for core network solutions. SIP Director enriches these solutions with system level carrier-grade performance and resilience through an intelligent SIP-enabled ADC solution. Below is a partial list of features and benefits; for additional information please consult the solutions brochure.
Interoperability and Constant Standard Updates
Even though SIP is an IETF/RFC 3261 standard, many SIP extensions and protocol implementations including support for IMS (3GPP & TISPAN) or support of more advanced features and services are not standard. SIP Director supports all common SIP transport protocols including common transports (e.g., UDP, TCP and TLS), IMS extensions, messaging headers and security features among others. By affording a robust, RFC 3261 compliant SIP proxy, SIP Director greatly simplifies deployment of SIP services across different standards, serving as a gateway for on-the-fly support of SIP/UDP, SIP/TCP, SIP/TLS and SIPS/TLS connecting with SIP Servers, Proxies, Gateways and UAs.
High Availability, Fail-over and Disaster Recovery
Radware’s SIP Director provides optimal call completion, recognizing application failures and overcoming them at any call state. SIP-based call establishment, responsiveness, completion and continuity are critical for SIP deployments in large scale networks. To ensure high availability of SIP services, SIP Director performs advanced health, resource and call handling capacity checks across all SIP aware entities. By intelligently and accurately routing SIP traffic across server clusters, SIP Director guarantees SIP service fulfillment and optimal call completion. SIP Director is a fully redundant solution with internal local fail-over and global traffic redirection and off-loading and backup between locations, thus ensuring carrier-grade resilience and multi-site disaster recovery.
Scalability and Performance
SIP services must be capable of scaling to accommodate growing volumes of users and calls. However, SIP application state management and the need to support TCP and TLS transport, introduces service scaling challenges. By optimizing SIP resource selection across application servers, core network entities and border elements, SIP Director improves SIP service performance and QoS. It achieves this by employing IP and SIP call/messaging load balancing along with TLS/TCP off-loading and acceleration, connection reuse and aliasing. SIP Director streamlines the utilization of SIP resources, enabling unlimited and scalable call handling capacity. In addition, SIP Director makes it possible to meet dynamic load and peak usage requirements by off-loading and managing SIP traffic between locations, while enabling transparent server addition, for tuned service capacity management and a highly economical “build-out as you grow” approach.
Time-to-Market
Building a SIP service that can overcome the challenges associated with high availability, resilience, scalability, security and interoperability, typically requires long development cycles. The result is unwanted delays in service deployment and service launch. In contrast, SIP Director is a configurable “out-of-the-box” carrier-grade solution, which does not require coding for deployment. This in turn greatly reduces complexity and time-to-market for SIP service deployments for vendors, integrators and carriers.