MetaSwitch:Carrier-class softswitch and applications solutions

MetaSwitch delivered the best combination of native IP capabilities, residential and business-class features, and scalability. John Stadter, President, ComSpanUSA

METASPHERE ARCHITECTURE

MetaSphere offers a pure server farm architecture, whether for plain old voicemail or offering advanced services. This enables us to deliver a number of key benefits to you and your subscribers that simply do not exist in the vast majority of alternative solutions.

MetaSphere in IMS

How MetaSphere fits into the IMS architecture.

MetaSphere is natively IP and IMS compliant and fits directly into next-generation networks. MetaSwitch and parent company Data Connection have been closely involved with the IMS development and understand where and how an application server platform must integrate with evolving IMS networks.
MetaSphere offers exceptionally high availability. Full N+1 support in every part of the solution delivers 99.999% availability, but most importantly subscribers, mailboxes and other service data are not tied to specific servers. Therefore, regardless of at what point a failure occurs, every individual subscriber will continue to enjoy full service.
MetaSphere provides linear scalability and investment protection. The solution is entirely based on cost-effective standard hardware, so that we can deploy whichever server, storage and networking equipment you prefer. Multiple hardware solutions can be used in the same deployment. This allows very granular scalability, by adding small numbers of low-end servers, but also ensures that deployed hardware need never be removed from the system even when the solution is upgraded.

The overall architecture is shown in the following diagram, with a more detailed description below.

Server farm architecture. Farms of functionally identical servers communicate through open standards: SIP, LDAP, IMAP, VXML, SMTP, HTTP� This allows components from alternative sources to be deployed alongside MetaSphere.
- All components run on COTS server hardware, so customers benefit immediately from latest advances in server technology and hardware investment is protected.
- Subscribers are not tied to particular servers and therefore the failure of any components does not affect service to any subscriber.
- Servers can be added at any time without system downtime, allowing platform expansion or software upgrades without affecting service.
All service data stored on network attached storage (NAS). This is critical to providing resilience to component failure, supports horizontal scaling of server farms and simplifies backups and provides RAID protection. NAS solutions provide substantial advantages over application platforms that rely purely on a Storage Area Network (SAN). However, MetaSphere can also integrate with a SAN by using a NAS frontend to the SAN � this provides all the benefits of server reliability and scalability of NAS while leveraging existing investment in a SAN.
Common subscriber directory offers a single point for provisioning, authentication, authorization, and accounting. However, this is also a key touchpoint for IMS integration.