VoIP Clustering SIP Farm

SIP Farm is Prevantage Fusion's technology for clustering voice-over-IP (VoIP) for 99.999% uptime, redundancy, and scalability.

Prevantage Fusion All-Active Dynamic Cluster already holds the world SPECmail record and has demonstrated a 10-million VoIP subscriber environment. Working with HP, Intel, Navtel Communications, and F5 Networks in an emulated real-world environment, Prevantage Corporation highlighted and documented the massive scalability of the SIP Farm technology on a 64-CPU Superdome system from HP

Both Dynamic Cluster and Super Cluster deployment implementations can be clustered with SIP Farm, and the members of a cluster allocated to the SIP Farm can be based on traffic or regional geographic node placement.

The Prevantage Fusion Dynamic Cluster maintains the information about all servers enabled for SIP Farm. Incoming SIP UDP packets and TCP connections are distributed to those servers using regular/simple load balancers.

The receiving server detects if the received packet must be processed on a certain SIP Farm server - it checks if the packet is a response or an ACK packet for an existing transaction or if the packet is directed to a task created on a certain server. In this case the packet is relayed from one SIP Farm cluster member to the target member.

Packets not directed to a particular SIP Farm server are distributed to all SIP Farm members based on the Prevantage Fusion cluster algorithms and the currently available set of the active SIP Farm cluster members. In the case of the addition or loss of a SIP Farm member (such as a hardware failure), the traffic is redistributed to other SIP Farm members to maintain consistent signalling.

The following diagram demonstrates a "8x4" Dynamic Cluster (8 Frontends and 4 Backends) using the optional "SIP Farm Specialization", which allows for a subset of all Dynamic Cluster members to be allocated as part of the SIP Farm. This technique can be used to protect the Quality of Service (QOS) of voice and real-time requirements by separating the email traffic from the SIP/RTP traffic, while continuing to maintain the single-system image of the Dynamic Cluster with consolidated identity management.