Sonus Claims to Lead in NFV with Cloud-Optimized Session Border Controller

Sonus Networks announced key enhancements to its Session Border Controller Software edition (SBC SWe). With these updates, Sonus’ industry-leading SBC SWe allows service providers to break free from proprietary hardware and accelerate real-time communications in public and private Clouds.

By using a common management and provisioning interface across its entire SBC portfolio, Sonus enables customers to migrate from hardware to software without a massive investment in their OSS and BSS infrastructures.

As customers move beyond single instance virtualization to a full Cloud implementation, an orchestration ecosystem becomes increasingly important. Sonus has proven its Cloud capabilities through collaboration testing with market-leading orchestration vendors, such as Juniper, Dorado, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Overture/ADVA, to facilitate Virtual Network Functions (VNF) implementations.

Today, Sonus is providing customers with a true, software-only SBC that is optimized for Cloud deployments. Sonus’ SBC SWe is the leading SBC in the marketplace, architected to enable and secure, real-time communications in the Cloud without compromising performance or scale. The SBC SWe is software that runs on industry-standard servers in a private data-center environment as a VNF in an Openstack Cloud infrastructure, or on a public Cloud service, like Amazon AWS. No proprietary hardware or physical digital signaling processor resources are required to support any of the SBC SWe’s features, including high availability, encryption, security, transcoding and routing.

The latest SBC SWe release provides the elasticity that is achievable with a Cloud deployment. Leveraging auto registration and auto configuration capabilities, the release makes it possible to instantiate a run-time ready virtual SBC, speeding up service delivery. In conjunction with system utilization and traffic analytics, Sonus now provides an essential feedback loop between virtual SBC performance and service orchestration so that on-demand instantiation can be automated to maximize operational efficiency. This release also includes innovative load balancing mechanisms to manage resource utilization across multiple SBC VNFs and is designed to ensure optimal performance of virtual SBCs in the network. Additionally, with this release, Sonus delivers network-wide licensing where a pool of session licenses can be shared across all SBC VNF instances, enabling new service pricing models.

“If you look at the increase of real-time service congestion and the pervasive migration of networks to the Cloud, it is clear that our industry is changing,” said Kevin Riley, Sonus senior vice president and CTO. “Sonus’ strategy capitalizes on our heritage of enabling secure, reliable and scalable real-time communications, beginning with the transition from TDM to IP and now into the Cloud. Sonus has led several important network transformations and we are ideally positioned to lead our customers to the Cloud with SBC technologies that are optimized for Cloud deployments. Sonus’ SBCs allow service providers to move to hybrid and pure software architectures with minimal friction and ultimately deliver services faster and win more customers.”

“As more operators move to an NFV architecture, the ability to ease migration, accelerate service delivery and scale services up and down quickly are key drivers,” said Diane Myers, senior research director at IHS. “By delivering a software-only, open architecture SBC that delivers auto configuration, load balancing and scales on demand, Sonus is addressing requirements for migrating to a secure NFV environment.”

“NFV offers service providers and their customers the opportunity to easily deliver new services, reduce costs, and improve flexibility, especially as enterprises migrate to full-Cloud or hybrid-Cloud architectures,” said Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director, Nemertes Research. “Sonus’ SBC SWe enhancements allows service providers to provision functions like network performance management and optimization, session border control, and session interworking into virtual infrastructure, manageable via existing NFV OSS frameworks.”