London-Based Telecommunications Company Relies On PortaOne’s Flagship Product To Deliver Suite of Hosted IPPBX Services Across South Africa, Middle East, Australia and Europe.

When Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in Spring 2010, grounded planes were only the beginning of the headaches. Many business functions were brought to a complete halt, including product deliveries and professional conferences. Key employees, stranded far from home, were forced into disaster recovery mode to maintain critical services.

With such scenarios straining vital communications links throughout Europe, one company—Pure IP—kept its customers in business. And at its core was PortaOne’s PortaSwitch VoIP services platform.

“Both our resellers and corporate customers benefitted from PortaSwitch’s ability to run diverse services during disaster recovery situations like the volcanic eruption and the snowstorms earlier this year,” said Gary Forrest, Pure IP managing director. “PortaSwitch allows us to build our network on the premise of redundancy at multiple points.”

Pure IP, headquartered in London, is part of a new breed of VoIP telecommunications providers that outperform global giants by nimbly servicing wholesale and retail business customers wherever they may be, using next generation solutions. Using telehouse network facilities in London, Johannesburg and Auckland, Pure IP provides 24/7 service and support to customers in 17 countries via a system that extends from New York City to Sydney, Australia.

“We operate a state-of-the-art network powered by Cisco and Quintum to ensure maximum redundancy and quality of service provisioning,” stated Forrest. “But our billing, customer management and softswitching functions rest exclusively with PortaSwitch.”

PortaSwitch is capable of handling the complete call control and converged VoIP billing functions of a diversified digital services company, enabling wholesale VoIP carriers and ITSPs to deliver a wide variety of business models quickly and flexibly. The comprehensive product consists of a real-time billing system, class 4 and 5 SIP softswitch, and application servers that deliver converged VoIP billing and provisioning, SIP call control, unified messaging, IP Centrex and hosted IP PBX, callback management, IVRs, conferencing and more.

“PortaSwitch allows us to give our customers a full suite of hosted VoIP services including SIP trunking, international numbering, conference bridges and MPLS connectivity,” Forrest explained. “We’ve been very impressed with the flexibility PortaSwitch provides, as well as its scalability—particularly in respect of new services such as callback, conferencing and the like.”

Pure IP had looked at Digitalk and other billing and call management platforms before selecting PortaSwitch. As Forrest noted, however, PortaSwitch offered a totally different level of flexibility. “We were also pleased with the sales process, which was managed in an honest, direct and attentive way,” he stated, adding that PortaOne’s Premium PortaCare has been an excellent technical support and maintenance service. “The quality of technical support is very good, particularly when looking at more complex issues or new services,” he commented.

Since adopting PortaOne’s VoIP product nearly two years ago, Pure IP has seen its business volume grow each month. Forrest attributes a large share of his company’s success to the stability and strong feature set PortaSwitch provides.

“At Pure IP, we take pride in differentiating our services through speed of implementation, stability and excellent aftercare support,” he said. “PortaSwitch is a feature-rich solution that services customers well—in Gibraltar, New Zealand, Iraq, South Africa, or anywhere else we choose to compete.”

Yesterday was the last of three busy days at Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC where PortaOne exhibited participating in the International Telecommunication Week 2010.

Please meet PortaOne team in three weeks at CommunicAsia 2010 in Singapore. For four days, on June 15-18, we will be at our booth 3H1-10 located at Hall 3 of Singapore Expo within the Canadian Pavilion.

Combination of PortaOne’s VoIP Call Control/Billing Platform and TelcoBridges’ VoIP Gateway Line Gives Service Providers Exceptional Performance Plus Room for Growth

PortaOne today announced a new partnership with TelcoBridges™, maker of Tmedia™ VoIP gateways, following successful interoperability testing between Tmedia products and PortaOne’s PortaSwitch VoIP call control and billing management software platform. The announcement, made at International Telecommunications Week 2010, assures telecom service providers not only of seamless operation between the products, but also a combination of reliability, scalability and system flexibility suitable for today’s most demanding network and market requirements.

A recognized leader in the design and manufacture of telecommunications hardware, TelcoBridges has developed Tmedia, the industry’s highest density VoIP gateways that deliver exceptional performance, energy efficiency and interoperability. Based on a unified technical architecture, each Tmedia VoIP/media gateway integrates T1/E1/J1, DS-3 and OC3/STM-1 connectivity and multiple concurrent signaling protocols such as SS7, ISDN, SIP, SIGTRAN, and H.248 in the same unique device. Carriers and service providers in over 50 countries use TelcoBridges’ VoIP gateways to drive network convergence, consolidate multiple disparate devices, and more cost-effectively expand their network footprints.

By integrating with PortaSwitch, Tmedia gateways ensure the highest levels of performance are maintained. PortaSwitch, a Class 5-level product, is able to handle the full range of call control and billing functions of a diversified digital services company, from billing and provisioning to advanced call features, monitoring and reporting. The comprehensive product consists of a real-time billing system, class 4/5 SIP softswitch, and application servers that deliver converged VoIP billing and provisioning, SIP call control, unified messaging, IP Centrex and hosted IP PBX, callback management, IVRs, conferencing and more.

Tmedia gateways offer a high system density for systems with limited rack availability. In a single 1U or 2U gateway, Tmedia supports up to 2048 voice channels; it also reduces SS7 costs by having multiple point codes in a single box, or multiple boxes with a single SS7 point code. The product’s non-blocking capabilities ensure that multiple signal protocols, as well as multiple codecs, can be run at the same time.

To both lower operating costs and provide a greener infrastructure, Tmedia gateways run on up to 2/3 less power than other gateway devices of similar capacity. Power, cooling and data center co-location costs are all reduced, thanks to the green design.

PortaOne at ITW 2010

PortaOne is showcasing its PortaSwitch platform during International Telecommunications Week 2010, May 24-26, from its exhibit at Booth 812 in the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

About TelcoBridges

TelcoBridges is clearly defining the future of telecommunications technologies. With the industry’s premier unified hardware platform for network convergence, value-added services, and performance management, TelcoBridges is enabling service providers to meet and exceed their service goals while ensuring exceptional operating cost-efficiency. TelcoBridges’ channel partners, including value-added resellers, system integrators and solution developers, have delivered and deployed carrier-grade solutions in over 50 countries around the world. These include VoIP gateways, mobile value-added services, unified communications, network monitoring, lawful intercept, location-based services, and many others. TelcoBridges is a recognized leader within the telecom industry, ranked as #175 within the 2009 Deloitte North American Fast 500, thanks to its revenue growth, which exceeded 777% during the period spanning 2004-2008. For additional information, please visit http://www.telcobridges.com.

MR21 Provides New Capacity and Redundancy to PortaSwitch Procinctus, PortaOne’s Ultimate Telecom Services and Subscriber Management Product.

PortaSwitch Procinctus, PortaOne’s ultimate high capacity telecommunications services and subscriber management software platform, has gained a completely redesigned and fully clustered architecture. The new architecture, made possible by PortaOne’s Maintenance Release 21 (MR21), places the business critical elements of the system in a cluster that runs in parallel on multiple servers.

Previously, PortaSwitch Procinctus distributed the various billing engine functions (e.g., authorization, registration, and routing control) among multiple dedicated servers in order to leverage the power of several machines and boost overall performance. The new clustering architecture delivers exceptional redundancy of these essential functions; in addition, transparent load-sharing increases the capacity level of the whole system.

In addition to PortaSIP (Class 4 and 5 softswitch) and PortaUM (unified messaging and IVR platform) that already run in cluster on multiple servers in parallel as a part of PortaSwitch Procinctus, MR21 introduces the RADIUS billing cluster, an exact replica of the architecture implemented in PortaOne’s high-end PortaBilling Oracularius product.

“With VoIP adoption growing exponentially in worldwide, the need for world-class durability, scalability and failover protection has become a prime requirement. The introduction of MR21, and a new clustering architecture, to PortaSwitch Procinctus accomplishes this,” said Andriy Zhylenko, chief technical officer for PortaOne.

Previously, the distributed architecture of PortaBilling100 Advanced included seven servers, with specific functions attributed to each: master and standby master servers; registration and authorization servers; Web server; and two dedicated database servers. The redesigned clustered architecture of PortaBilling100 Advanced in the new PortaSwitch Procinctus consists of three closely integrated segments:

• Three servers in the RADIUS billing cluster that ensures no service outage in case one of the servers fails
• Three database servers: a master DB, a standby DB for operational redundancy, and the replica DB for data redundancy and data processing for statistics and reporting
• A Web server to provide the service provisioning interface for administration as well as customer self-care pages

As in the older version, PortaSwitch Procinctus also includes two PortaSIP servers and two PortaUM servers with a PortaBridge. PortaSIP and PortaUM servers can run in a cluster, creating an unbreakable redundancy setup or be used for load balancing.

The configuration server, a new MR21 addition to all PortaSwitch installations, is a single point for managing and upgrading the whole PortaSwitch Procinctus set up. It is also used as a logging storage to remove the analytical task loads from the servers directly involved in the operational processes.

PortaOne offers the upgrade to MR21 to its customers as a part of PortaCare at no additional cost. For more information about new redesigned architecture of PortaSwitch Procinctus please contact PortaOne team.

With MR21, PortaSwitch utilizes an innovative system of maintaining and modifying the software code on each server, allowing service providers to properly address all potential upgrade issues, and enables to:

• Migrate quickly to a new maintenance release, without any problems on the way and obtain the system that operates 100% according to how it is intended to operate.
• Safely rollback to exactly the same version of the software used prior to the update, in case there are any issues with the functionality of the new release.

PortaSwitch deploys a dual software version management system that eliminates both the risk of incompatibility between the updated components and dangerous situations when the update fails and the system ends up without any operable software becoming totally unusable.

The disk subsystem on each PortaSwitch server contains 3 separate partitions:

• One partition stores the actual application data.
• Two other partitions are equal in size and can contain the full set of the software “code” required to operate the server: operating system, third-party libraries and modules and the actual code for a specific application.

The configuration agent updates the “local” files based on the system’s configuration stored in the configuration server. At the specific time the new partition is automatically marked as “active” the server is restarted using the new version of the code. The potential downtime is minimal, just to complete the restart. Nothing is changed in the “old” partition. So if a rollback is required, it only requires a reboot from that partition and the server is back to the old, “stable” release.

After some time when an update to an even newer release is desired, this partition is wiped clean and the new version of the code is loaded into the recently emptied location. Then the process described above repeats. The same process is used to update to a new maintenance release or to a newer software build within the current release.

PortaSwitch relies on a large set of previously accumulated data to make decisions about how the service should be provided. All the data accumulated by the old software release are available to the new one after the upgrade to ensure the system’s proper operation. This involves changing the data files, database structures and data to accommodate the new release. Therefore, the update process includes 2 extra steps:

• Non-blocking data modifications are done as part of the “preparation” process, when the new release is already installed to the new partition, but before it becomes active.
• Blocking data modifications are those that may affect the system’s performance while they are being carried out. Therefore, those are done during off-peak periods.

This process allows the data modifications to be performed while the system still operates using the current release. During that time, the “older” version of the release operates with the “newer” version of the data. The same situation would happen if in performing a rollback to the older release. The PortaOne development and testing processes are specifically aimed to make this possible however we can only guarantee this inter-operability for the adjoining releases.

Please find more detailed information about the new updating process in PortaBilling Administrator Guide (look for Updating the System to a New Version section on page 17). This MR21 guide is available on the Documentation page along with other constantly renewed handbooks and manuals.