NET’s Universal Exchange (UX) a Next Generation, High Performance, Mediation Platform for Real-time Communications
Real-time communications - primarily voice today, but with the escalating growth of video - is undergoing a transformation from siloed dedicated solutions to become key anchor components within Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solutions from many vendors, deployed across enterprises and their business networks (both supply chain, partners and, importantly - customers). Speed and accuracy of performance greatly affect the Quality of Experience (QoE) of its users and, thus, its successful adoption. To facilitate this performance-sensitive transformation, NET has extended its 20+ years of successful delivery of high-quality mediation platforms into its next generation – the Universal Exchange. Emblematic of the quality and performance capability of the UX-family, its first model – the UX2000 – has already been qualified as a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) supporting the up-coming launch of Microsoft’s Lync UC&C solution and has already been operating in early customer deployments. While nice, the UX is but one of several qualified Lync SBAs from multiple manufacturers.
Commenting on the UX launch, Talbot Harty, Chief Development Officer, NET, noted, “The UX platform has been designed from the ground up with an amazing set of technology placed into a 1U chassis. We have taken the mediation platform to a whole new level. The UX2000 is a true enterprise-class product designed for modularity, outstanding performance, and ease of use. We are now in position to build upon the capabilities of this platform to deliver a comprehensive set of UX Series products for our target markets.”
NET claims that the UX platform takes its mediation portfolio to the next generation while keeping and, in fact enhancing the reliability, flexibility and deployability of the previous families - the successful VX and Quintum. The UX is interoperable with both and supports the transparent “drop-in” installation methodology for the upstream deployment model that was pioneered by NET. NET platforms are specifically designed to support upstream deployments with advanced features that give customers high levels of flexibility, scalability, quality of experience (QoE) and investment protection.
The UX is designed to deliver capabilities essential for UC, and with its improved speed and capacity, hopefully with a high user perceived QoE. The UX is a modular platform, in a 1U chassis, built to facilitate unified communications, enterprise border controller and multi-service gateway applications – all in one box.
The UX has substantial speed and functionality on board and supports all forms of mediation processing - for IP-to-TDM, IP-to-IP, or TDM-to-TDM solutions. An optional, high-performance, server-class application solutions module (ASM) based on a 2.53 GHz Intel Core i7 processor can also be added for third-party application support. The high capacity allows the UX to avoid the performance bottlenecks found in other platforms that result in severely degraded call capacities during high-complexity media processing operations. The UX2000 can support up to 600 simultaneous transcoded and encrypted calls.
The initial UX2000 software release has many significant features focused on delivering:
- Superior QoE
- Industry leading voice quality
- Intelligent call routing
- Call forking, and
- Broad PBX interoperability
In addition, the UX has a web-based interface to simplify and accelerate solution deployment as well as a user interface for configuration and realtime node management.
The UX platform design allows for flexibility to add additional features through software release. In addition, the design is flexible allowing new chassis models that could scale up or down to support both smaller branch offices or larger enterprises or Service Providers.
In summary, the UX2000 “Unified Exchange” is a next-generation platform for Real-Time communications, building upon NET’s and the industry’s experience and requirements. The UX2000 supports UC solutions, including qualification by Microsoft for Lync 2010 (as well as OCS R2) and adds essential Session Border Controller capabilities all in one box - not in separate devices as is often required by other solutions. This single module device simplifies the multi-interfaces, ports and log-ons required of others, into one easy-to-manage solution. These characteristics make the UX more secure, and its modular design and processor also allows for the deployment of third-party applications. And finally, the UX2000 builds upon NET’s 20+-year record of successfully delivering, as promised, capable technology solutions for complex networking configurations, requirements and standards.
As the UC&C space evolves with extended solutions like Microsoft’s Lync, NET’s challenge is to be recognized as a key supplier of mediation capabilities, amongst its competitors and gain market share over its perhaps better known competitors.
This paper is sponsored by NET.
For more information on UCStrategies.com about NET's announcement: