The business of IP telephony is quite huge and it has several elements and factors associated with it. In any case, the availability and scalability of these solutions are very crucial to keep business running. This is the reason the top smart telephony platform providers put extra effort into making a highly scalable solution and deploying it to ensure the high availability of the platform. A VoIP Softswitch solution is one of the most crucial systems that have to support more than 95% of availability with commendable scalability.
What is a Softswitch solution?
It is a VoIP solution that combines two words into it: software and switch. Traditionally, a manual resource, mostly receptionist, used a switch-based hardware system to connect the caller to the right destination. The Softswitch solution replaced this hardware based manual system with an automated solution.
The VoIP Softswitch software adds the advantages of VoIP (Voice over internet protocol) to this system. There are multiple types of Softswitch systems available in the market. A class 4 Softswitch solution and class 5 Softswitch software are the most popular Softswitch solutions among service providers.
VoIP service providers use both of these systems to offer VoIP related services. The end user does not need to buy this product or invest in VoIP development services to get this VoIP solution
Why do the high availability (HA) and scalability of a VoIP Softswitch matter?
Both class 4 Softswitch and class 5 Softswitch solutions are used by providers to offer services to other service providers or business users. It means the user base that uses the services of these solutions would be massive. The failure in the system for any reason causes several challenges and issues. One of the major drawbacks is losing money for each second the system is down.
On the other hand, the scalability of VoIP Softswitch solutions is necessary to match the growing need for service and increase revenue generation. If the software is not highly scalable, it will make you lose clients that are ready to pay. Even if you invest in customization or completely new development, this will also waste time and make you lose money. Thus, your system has to be highly scalable.
Now that you understand why HA and the scalable Softswitch solution is a must, let’s understand the concepts of high availability and scalability in more detail.
High Availability of a Softswitch
A class 5 or class 4 Softswitch solution that is designed to function round the clock with zero to minimal downtime is called a high available (HA) system. High availability is a measurement that defines how much time a system will be up and running and delivers the expected performance without any interruption.
An HA system will stay active and deliver predefined performance for the defined percentage of uptime. The configurations made by the VoIP experts will have identical backups of the system to avoid occurrences of any type of system failure to achieve excellent uptime of Softswitch solution. Usually, people consider redundancy an excellent measure to achieve high uptime of telephony solutions.
Redundancy can be achieved for multiple components to achieve high uptime of the class 4 Softswitch and class 5 Softswitch solutions.
Server redundancy
In this case, we configure an identical server with the same storage, software, computing power, etc. as a primary server. It will work as a backup to take over in case the server fails to handle the call volume of Softswitch solutions. This can help in handling any failure in the software, hardware, network, etc. to keep HA uptime high.
Data redundancy
You can also back up and keep the data in a redundant system to use in case of data loss.
Power supply and internet
The VoIP based solutions include the VoIP Softswitch software that works on the internet and electricity. Thus, a backup to supply power and internet should have the redundancy to handle the power failure situation.
Disk drives
RAID usually helps in disk drive redundancy creation to handle the situation of disk drive failure of the primary server.
How is high availability measured?
The smart telephony platform providers often agree upon this measurement, which works as a benchmark to ensure whether the class 4 or class 5 Softswitch software is a highly available solution or not. This measurement is called a Service Level Agreement (SLA). SLA can also be defined for other quality criteria. The one defined for high availability is called uptime SLA. The best SLA can be 99.95% uptime SLA for the VoIP Softswitch solution.
VoIP Softswitch scalability
It is a process of multiplying or increasing the capacity of the system. A wholesome system, including, hardware and software should be flexible enough to improve the capacity without any major challenge or too big downtime. As a class 5 or class 4 Softswitch solution handles massive call volume, it is necessary to have a system that can work as a highly scalable system.
Software scalability
Telephony solutions developed using scalable platforms like FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPs, etc. are highly scalable in nature and they can help you upgrade the software capacity without much investment of time and resources.
Cloud
Compared to server-based infrastructure, cloud space offers higher scalability Of course, you can also scale up server based configurations to meet increasing business needs, but it would take quite a lot of time to get physical servers and then configure them to handle more traffic. To create a redundant environment to achieve high availability, you would further need to replicate the servers and other components. All this would be very resource intensive. On the other hand, ample cloud space is available that can help you scale up with ease and within less time than a physical server setup.
Concluding notes
A VoIP Softswitch solution is a very critical system to run telecommunication businesses. It is necessary to have a scalable solution and high availability setup to keep your business up and running, as well as, to support your business growth.
We can help you with the right Softswitch solutions, deployment, and consultation services. For more details, contact us.
