Carrier Dominance
Carrier White Paper 2600hz has impressive technical talent and they re approaching the problem of overrun telecom networks in a really intriguing fashion. They re definitely one company to keep an eye on. Michael Brandenberg, Analyst, Frost & Sullivan This white paper will cover the rollout of 2600hz infrastructure with a major operator in North America. In this paper, we will describe the basic network design of the Carrier Kazoo infrastructure, the rollout timing and a brief ROI analysis of the associated operator expenditures. After reading this paper, you should have a strong understanding of how Kazoo can dramatically impact carrier operations by providing new methods of access and lower fixed cost structures. Kazoo lets Product Managers think about services instead of networks leading to more agile development, shorter lead times and ultimately better products. The Anatomy Of An Operator This section will discuss the current state of the art in Telecom Infrastructure design. These design patterns have been created as a result of multiple global installations leveraging the Kazoo Infrastructure for core voice and messaging services. After reading this section you should understand the 2600hz philosophy with respect to Kazoo s design and operational control.
This section will discuss the current state of the art in Telecom Infrastructure design. These design patterns have been created as a result of multiple global installations leveraging the Kazoo Infrastructure for core voice and messaging services. After reading this section you should understand the 2600hz philosophy with respect to Kazoo s design and operational control. When Kazoo is engaged by operators it is typically to augment existing functionality in a programmatic fashion. For example, an operator might be running a Broadsoft or Metaswitch based infrastructure, but due to multiple operational considerations additional infrastructure is required. A classic example is the need for large conference bridges (>10000 attendees) or a bespoke application that needs to be developed for a marquee client. These sorts of applications are difficult to design, deploy and manage on traditional infrastructure, but due to the design of Kazoo their implementation can become trivially simple. At the highest level, an operator consists of a border, an application infrastructure, a packet core and OSS/BSS systems. Kazoo can subsume all or a subset of such networks with the notable exception of the packet core. From a high level, Kazoo consists of: A State of the Art Border Controller Scalable Media Servers Managed Application Servers Robust Databases Full OSS/BSS Control Interface CLIENTS CARRIER SBC SBC SBC E911 PROVIDER MEDIA SERVERS MEDIA SERVERS MEDIA SERVERS SMS PROVIDER APPLICATIONS APPLICATIONS APPLICATIONS TAXATION SERVICES DATABASE CREDIT CARD PROCESSOR WEBSITE
An operator can leverage the Kazoo stack to deliver just one component or the entire stack of a communications infrastructure. For example, an operator might leverage the managed applications servers, databases and media servers with their existing border controller and OSS/BSS systems to provide the aforementioned large conference bridges or distributed call center as a service. The point is that Kazoo is flexible, powerful and responsive for existing operations and greenfield deployments alike. It is the opinion of the 2600hz team that the keys to success for an operator are resiliency, accessibility and elegance. The system cannot go down, it has to be something customers can consume easily and it should feel natural to use the interface. That last point about elegance is a key differentiator for the 2600hz team as many companies fail to recognize the importance of excellent interface design even in the Enterprise. Great design matters, especially in the Enterprise. Strategic Advantages This section will discuss some of the operational and strategic advantages of the Kazoo Platform. After reading this section, you should have a firm understanding of Kazoo s key differentiators, how Kazoo can lower your costs and a bit of the philosophy behind the system. Operators are concerned primarily with two things: Cost of operation Competitive Advantages Cost Of Operation Cost Time In a typical operator network configuration, many components are what we would define as a single-point of failure. Often, things like Application servers and even media servers are not managed in a scalable and meshed fashion. The practical effect of design decisions like these is simple: your network is vulnerable to downtime in the event of specific infrastructure failure. Kazoo is not, and the reasons why are part of the reason it s such a special piece of technology.
When we designed Kazoo, we decided that we wanted to be hardware agnostic. This means that if a server breaks you throw a new server in and go. You do not have to wait for a proprietary server to arrive, you just have to have another server available. Whereas with other architectures, your system administrators will literally run around with their hair on fire until a new proprietary server arrives, with Kazoo they can just grab a new server or load a virtual image and there s 0 customer impact. Lower labor means lower costs and higher margins, which bring us to our next point: Kazoo s Competitive Advantages. Competitive Advantages While Kazoo is an extremely robust piece of software, for the sake of brevity we re going to focus on 3 material advantages the Kazoo Platform has over competitive architectures: On-Demand, Always-Available Design Accessibility Velocity and Network Virtualization On-Demand SMB Enterprise 0 Global As mentioned previously, other architectures have a single point of failure design that makes them difficult to support at scale (or in the event of an emergency). Kazoo s core philosophy is fault tolerance. We operate a fully mesh network which means that having your network customer addressable just means having a node online somewhere in the network. Put another way, even if two thirds of your infrastructure burns to the ground your customers will never know. This is an always-available cloud that is self-healing and self-scaling; the system literally detects and repairs problems before they become outages. No other infrastructure on the planet offers you the kind of resiliency Kazoo provides with commodity servers.
Accessibility API Kazoo is the only hardware agnostic telecom infrastructure that supports almost all methods of communication natively and transparently. Whether you are running cellular, fixed or radio communications, Kazoo can manage and control your network using one common set of APIs. Other infrastructures have APIs, but when you look at them you have to wonder if they were made for humans or robots. Engineers are people too and there s a reason that making code readable is important (it makes fixing it faster amongst a host of other benefits). Kazoo has APIs for everything from Handset registration to rate limiting to dynamic call control. By leveraging the Kazoo platform, operators can expose their service-based architectures to the outside world while still maintaining permissionsbased control and full monetization. This is an experience akin to Voxeo or Twilio but in your infrastructure and under your control. Using the Kazoo APIs, a product manager can build powerful services with the shortest times in the industry to market. Ship telecom products in weeks using only web engineers. Velocity And Network Virtualization Kazoo is built to go fast. Using out TelecomSDN (Software Defined Networking) product, operators can deploy, manage and scale their networks on-demand and at any pace. The point of Kazoo is to decouple networks from services so product managers think about their products and not the infrastructure upon which they run. Using Kazoo, product managers and engineers can collaborate on the product without worrying about which pipes will carry their bits or which servers need to be deployed. The engineering team simply consumes the services just like an external client greatly decreasing development time within the Operator and in the Enterprise. In contrast, The administration team manages the infrastructure resources by clicking on a map. You can even deploy a full data center in just a few clicks! In addition, the system administration team has alerts automatically surfaced from the infrastructure right in the in the control panel. Best of all the control panel provides a visual health check for the infrastructure that lets anyone visually assess the health of the system in five seconds or less.
Kazoo s Network Orchestration allows product managers to ship fast and administrators to avoid downtime every time. You should now have a firm understanding of a few of Kazoo s competitive advantages including the costs associated with operation. In particular, high availability, access and automation are key highlights and competitively differentiate Kazoo from other entrants in the Telecom Infrastructure space. An Example Network Configuration This section will cover the operational design of a small operator network when leveraging the kazoo platform along with the resilient design of each of the underlying components. After reading this, you should understand more of the philosophy of 2600hz engineering and the reason why operators consider our infrastructure to be a unique offering in Telecom. For a 100,000 handset cluster, 2600hz recommends a minimum of three physical locations for full redundancy and maximal operational uptime. With three physical locations, 99.999% uptime is easily achievable. By leveraging our meshed TelecomSDN technology, an operator can deploy Kazoo on physical or virtual appliances directly from a simple point-n-click GUI. Let s look at a 100,000 handset configuration in three data centers. DATABASE DATABASE CUSTOMERS CUSTOMERS HTTP HTTP AMQP AMQP ISP ISP EVENTS EVENTS MEDIA SERVERS SBC RTP + SIP FIBER INTERCONNECT (CARRIER A) FIBER INTERCONNECT (CARRIER A) DUAL PROXY/ SRV SETUP DUAL PROXY/ SRV SETUP FIBER INTERCONNECT (CARRIER A) FIBER INTERCONNECT (CARRIER A) RTP + SIP MEDIA SERVERS SBC AGENTS
SBCs You ll notice that we leverage at least dual infrastructure in each datacenter. We take redundancy seriously because downtime is much more expensive than over provisioning. In the above scenario we leverage dual Border controllers in each site and since we multi-home our handsets to multiple data centers the level of reliability is rock-solid. The SBC functions as a traffic cop (reverse proxy) in our network; as load comes in, the SBC ensures the work is optimally distributed. As long as an SBC is available, the load will be optimally distributed. Kazoo s Border controllers can handle extremely large loads and do so in a fault-tolerant fashion automatically. Media Servers With 2600hz, we have a few philosophical beliefs about our cluster integrity, particularly with respect to Media Servers. We believe that it is of paramount importance that the infrastructure be 100% available, but not that every individual server be 100% available. That is to say, when a server fails, the infrastructure should just handle that and not require manual intervention or customer attention of any sort. As such, each datacenter has multiple media servers, and, in the event of a particular media server failure there s essentially zero client impact. While individual servers may fail, the client experience should never fail as long as there s provisioned capacity to manage the load. Unlike other architectures, no particular client is married to a particular set of servers; the routing and management decisions are made at the time of request which results in more optimal system performance. Put simply, any server can handle any client so one server failing doesn t impact the performance of the system for any particular client. Kazoo is always available by design, and this on-demand access is achieved through robust mesh networking technology combined with our TelecomSDN management interface.
Application Servers The entire point of 2600hz s technology is availability. The application servers reside in each datacenter and our infrastructure requests access to the application services over our messaging bus. No client is bound to a particular application server, if a server fails there is no client impact. The point is that, just like each other part of our stack, we can more optimally manage our resources if we make the routing decisions at the time of request. The application servers provide virtually all of the Kazoo functionality. From Voicemails to SIP trunking to Call Center: it all lives on the Application servers. Because of our meshed network design, the infrastructure is always available even in the event of multiple datacenters going offline. Kazoo leverages a fully-meshed application server design to provide carrier grade reliability and availability. Database While all of the components of our infrastructure are serious endeavors, the database is such a critical portion of our operation that we would be remiss not to discuss our philosophy. We leverage a proven Enterprise Database that is in production in a large number of sensitive operations including the Military, Fortune 1000 and Government operations. This Database is, by design, fault-tolerant and we, again by design, require the database to be replicated to at least 3 different physical locations. We selected this system because it has a number of resilient qualities including full network partition tolerance, which is somewhat of a rarity in the telecom world. After running this database in production for years we feel confident in saying that its performance, reliability and continuous development are second to none. Again, the database, like every other component in Kazoo, is meshed in such a fashion as to provide high availability without sacrificing performance. OSS / BSS Operational and Billing Support Systems are critical to the success of any modern telecom. We leverage our TelecomSDN product for OSS and we integrate with operator billing systems.
OSS 2600hz has spent a lot of time developing our TelecomSDN product. This interface provides instant feedback in a dashboard format. Any technician from a level one tech to an architect can instantly assess the health of the infrastructure and respond to changing circumstances in seconds. Just by clicking on the screen, your operational personnel can respond to physical anomalies, failed network links or other impairments in seconds. No other architecture available today allows for management in such a quick and easy format. BSS Over time we ve found that operators leverage a ton of different billing suites. It is not a trivial task to integrate a billing system, but it is doable and it is something we ve done in the past. We have experience integrating a number of complex billing systems and we have the engineering talent to complete these integrations in a timely and efficient manner. Billing integrations vary in complexity depending on the specifics of the operator and the number of services being integrated. Once the billing integration is completed, we expose billing controls via API and in our graphical user interface to make management and customer interaction simple. Now that you ve read all about the components of the Kazoo infrastructure, you should have a firm understanding of many of the competitive differentiators and the importance of reliability in designing distributed systems. Conclusion Kazoo is a powerful, fully-featured Telecom Infrastructure. Operators can leverage the Kazoo infrastructure to deliver scalable applications like Hosted PBX, SIP Trunking, Call Center and Conferencing. Additionally, operators can expose these services programmatically to internal and external developers with state of the art APIs and do so with the confidence of carrier-grade reliability. The fully meshed design and orchestration technology provided by Kazoo is second to none in Telecom providing operational sanity to Telecom teams all over the globe. Kazoo is a one-stop shop for managing all of your communications services.
We would love to talk more about the many values of partnering with 2600hz! For more information, contact: