IPgallery banks on Solaris SPARC
- by Frederic Pariente
IPgallery is a
global supplier of converged legacy and Next Generation Networks (NGN) products
and solutions, including: core network components and cloud-based Value Added
Services (VAS) for voice, video and data sessions.
IPgallery enables network operators and service providers to offer advanced
converged voice, chat, video/content services and
rich unified social communications in a combined legacy (fixed/mobile),
Over-the-Top (OTT) and Social Community (SC) environments for home and business
customers. Technically speaking, this offer is a scalable and robust telco solution
enabling operators to offer new services while controlling operating expenses (OPEX).
In its solutions, IPgallery leverages the following Oracle components: Oracle
Solaris, Netra
T4 and SPARC
T4 in order to provide a competitive and scalable solution
without the price tag often associated with high-end systems.
Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee
A unique feature of Oracle Solaris is the guaranteed binary compatibility between releases of
the Solaris OS. That means, if a binary
application runs on Solaris 2.6 or later, it will run on the latest release of
Oracle Solaris. IPgallery developed
their application on Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 then runs it on Solaris 11, without
any code modification or rebuild. The Solaris Binary Application Guarantee helps IPgallery protect their
long-term investment in the development, training and maintenance of their
applications.
Oracle Solaris Image Packaging System (IPS)
IPS is a new repository-based package management system that comes with Oracle Solaris
11. It provides a framework for
complete software life-cycle management such as installation, upgrade and
removal of software packages.
IPgallery
leverages this new packaging system in order to speed up and simplify software
installation for the R&D and production environments. Notably, they use IPS to deliver Solaris
Studio 12.3 packages as part of the rapid installation process of R&D environments, and during the production software deployment phase, they ensure software package
integrity using the built-in verification feature. Solaris IPS thus improves IPgallery's time-to-market
with a faster, more reliable software installation and deployment in production
environments.
Extreme Network Performance
IPgallery saw a huge improvement in application performance both in
CPU and I/O, when running on SPARC T4 architecture in compared to UltraSPARC T2
servers. The same application (with the same
activation environment) running on T2 consumes 40%-50% CPU, while it consumes only 10% of the CPU on T4. The testing environment comprised of: Softswitch
(Call management), TappS
(Telecom Application Server) and Billing Server running on same
machine and initiating various services in capacity of 1000 CAPS (Call
Attempts Per Second).
In addition, tests showed a huge improvement in the performance of the TCP/IP stack, which
reduces network layer processing and in the end Call Attempts latency. Finally, there is a huge improvement within the file system and disk I/O
operations; they ran all tests with maximum logging capability and it
didn't influence any benchmark values.
"Due to the huge improvements in performance and capacity using the T4-1
architecture, IPgallery has engineered the solution with less hardware. This means instead of deploying the solution
on six T2-based machines, we will deploy on 2 redundant machines while
utilizing Oracle
Solaris Zones and Oracle
VM for higher availability and virtualization"
Shimon Lichter, VP R&D, IPgallery
In conclusion, using the unique combination of Oracle Solaris and SPARC
technologies, IPgallery is able to offer solutions with much lower TCO, while providing a
higher level of service capacity, scalability and resiliency. This low-OPEX solution enables the operator, the end-customer, to deliver a high quality service while maintaining high profitability.
