Hosted VoIP

Enterprises rely on their wide area networks to handle mission critical communications, including VoIP and video conferencing, regardless of service disruptions.

At the same time, deploying VoIP and other bandwidth-intensive applications across any WAN is always a challenge, due to the great variety of network topologies and vendor environments, not to mention how the network is being used, when traffic peaks, what applications are being used, etc. As a business changes, its network utilization changes, thus enterprise networks need continuous monitoring and optimizing in order to maintain network performance.

But there will always be those unexpected outages and disruptions due to bottlenecks resulting from massive peaks in traffic, service provider outages, equipment failures or other unforeseen events. As such, companies today are looking for network solutions that offer improved reliability, resiliency and redundancy through automatic failover.

In response to this demand, Ecessa, which up until very recently was known as Astrocom, has introduced ClariLink, the first WAN link controller with specialized SIP-application management for improved reliability.

ClariLink enables SIP traffic to be deployed reliably across multiple WAN and/or service provider networks for redundant link connectivity and automatic real-time failover. This ensures that businesses and users keep call and data sessions active even in the event of a service provider outage.

Sitting between the routers on the enterprise LAN and the WAN port of the firewall, this voice and data network optimization solution computes which ISP link has the most available bandwidth and routes the session accordingly. If an ISP link becomes congested, the device automatically reduces traffic going to that link and redirects traffic to ISP links with more available bandwidth. If a link fails, the device automatically stops traffic to the link and redirects it to functioning links.

As company officials explain in a press release, the ability to load balance SIP connections over multiple WAN links is critical for successful and scalable VoIP environments. ClariLink acts as a front-end controller, managing diverse WAN links and bandwidth capacities to provide a redundant SIP origination and termination solution. The solution includes a SIP Proxy, SIP Registration Server and Network Address Translation (NAT) Proxy that allows SIP traffic to be load balanced with failover among multiple WAN links.

Not only does ClariLink intelligently and efficiently distribute network traffic among multiple, diverse network links (i.e. cable, xDSL, T1, wireless, satellite, etc.) it also provides aggregation (multi-homing) to improve bandwidth; automated inbound and intelligent outbound load balancing and failover; site failover and fallback and traffic shaping.

LAN-to-LAN direct routing works in conjunction with site-to-site channel bonding that combines two or more WAN links into one large network connection to provide greater available bandwidth and reliability for large file transfers.

Because the appliance solves the problem of SIP communications traversing NAT by functioning as the primary NAT device and addressing the issues with the “NATing” of SIP traffic, both reliability and quality of service are improved.

“More and more businesses are showing their interest in SIP trunking services, but some concerns around reliability remain,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst, enterprise voice and data, at Infonetics Research (News - Alert), in the release. “With Ecessa’s newest product, SMEs can deploy multiple WAN links, and enjoy high availability, automatic failover and link redundancy, ensuring the continued reliability of their IP network connectivity.”

“For service providers, system integrators and VARs, ClariLink provides them with the ability to offer a voice and data network optimization solution not previously attainable to SME’s,” added Ron Thomas, president and CEO of Ecessa. “This will open new doors of opportunity and generate additional revenues for our partners.”

The new family of ClariLink WAN Link Controllers geared for SMEs, which was announced in March, will be available in Q3 2009.

For more information about these new products, check out this article by Brad Johnson, lead developer for Ecessa.

Ecessa also recently announced two new customer wins -- St. Joseph's Academy, a private, all girls high school located in St. Louis, Missouri, and Bite Communications, a communications consultancy – both of which are now using the company’s PowerLink WAN link controller to manage their growing WAN infrastructure needs.