Media Server platform delivers higher scalability and enhanced NFV management to drive significantly lower TCO for voice and video services
HILLSBORO, OR, U.S. – January 17, 2018 – Radisys® Corporation, the global leader of open telecom solutions, today announced enhancements to its virtualized Media Server platform that deliver 30 percent capacity increases on Intel® architecture based servers and support a broader range of public and private cloud environments. In addition, Media Server supports HW-Assist, an architecture that can utilize additional available processing resources in off-the-shelf servers as well as Open Compute Project architecture platforms. By coupling standards-based NFV compliance with the ability to leverage all available hardware resources including Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), the resulting solution delivers advanced cloud media processing for HD voice, video calling and unified communications services; transcoding capabilities that enable carriers to connect users of mobile, desktop, and landline devices; and a data center footprint that is 6 to 10 times smaller than that of off-the-shelf servers’ CPU-based media processing alone, saving millions of dollars per year in capital and operating expenses.
News Highlights:
- Service providers globally are embracing the cloud to deliver communications services. However, a mix of disparate cloud environments has led to the need for separate media platforms for each cloud environment and individual applications. The end result is a cost prohibitive solution for cloud communications services.
- To solve this problem, Radisys’ Media Server platform provides service providers the ultimate flexibility in their choice of cloud and NFV management environments. The current release adds ONAP support, along with compatibility with the latest Nokia Cloudband and HP OpenNFV VNF management; VMware, RedHat, KVM and OpenStack hypervisors, and the Amazon EC2 platform to support deployments in a broad range of common public and private cloud environments. Additionally, support for the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) allows for integration with additional standards-based NFV management environments.
- Scalability in cloud environments is perhaps the most important aspect of ensuring cost-effective migration from traditional telecom architectures to cloud environments for demanding workloads like media processing. The latest release of Media Server improves on an already industry-leading scalability profile.
- The latest enhancements provide greater flexibility in managing the number and size of individual instances of Media Resource Function (MRF), enabling more compute resources to be employed for voice and video services – and improving hardware utilization by more than 10 percent while reducing CapEx and OpEx costs.
- Continued software performance optimization of Enhanced Voice Services (EVS) codec yields up to 30 percent greater capacity for the latest HD voice codec for mobile voice and audio services. This represents a significant savings for service providers at a time when more mobile handsets support the EVS codec. In addition to enabling high quality audio services, service providers are launching EVS-based services to lower their network costs by increasing subscriber volume on existing spectrum and improving the reach of their existing radio network infrastructure.
- The Media Server architecture is also built to take advantage of additional hardware resources, including DSPs and GPUs, available on off-the-shelf server configurations or through PCI Express® (PCIe®) expansion while still operating as a Virtual Network Function (VNF), retaining full cloud management features and workload elasticity.
- All existing applications using Radisys’ standard control interfaces can support this architecture – and ROI gain – without modification. All existing applications using Radisys’ standard control interfaces can support this architecture – and ROI gain – without modification. The new media processing hardware acceleration options also include support for plug-and-play acceleration modules and Open Compute Project architecture platforms designed for telco data centers. This can further reduce the footprint of media server and transcoding requirements for hyperscale deployments.
“For all the benefits of NFV, compute resources are not infinite. As a result, total cost of ownership still plays a role in determining service providers’ cloud investment strategies,” said Diane Myers, senior research director, IHS Markit. “Radisys’ Media Server approach addresses this by coupling the operational benefits of supporting public and private cloud environments, with the price-performance advantage of hardware assist for workloads that benefit from it.”
“As the trend to NFV has accelerated, the cost of virtualizing media processing on a large scale has been prohibitive. This has forced many service providers to a two-pronged strategy: moving application and control to the cloud, while deferring the move of data plane and signal processing intensive capabilities like media processing,” said Al Balasco, vice president, Media Server, Radisys. “Our latest Media Server release, which combines the operational cost savings, service agility, and management efficiency of NFV with the CapEx savings of HW-acceleration, gives our customers the advantage of the best price-performance in delivering media services that drive revenue, improve service stickiness, and have an outsized impact on their bottom line.”
About Radisys
Radisys, a global leader in open telecom solutions, enables service providers to drive disruption with new open architecture business models. Radisys’ innovative disaggregated and virtualized enabling technology solutions leverage open reference architectures and standards, combined with open software and hardware to power business transformation for the telecom industry, while its world-class services organization delivers systems integration expertise necessary to solve communications and content providers’ complex deployment challenges. For more information, visit www.Radisys.com.
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