Success for a mobile operator depends upon the ability to deliver a seamless and satisfactory experience to their subscribers. Key to this success is, of course, the availability of the network and its services.
Subscribers Can Take Service Availability for Granted
Today, mobile operators understand that hardware reliability is just a part of the story; firmware and software must be equally as reliable.
Starent Networks has taken great care to ensure that our embedded and operations software take full advantage of the redundant hardware designs, such as the self-healing switching fabric and independent management and control busses. We have also developed numerous industry firsts in the area of software redundancy features to help ensure availability of the ST16 and ST40 multimedia core platforms. These features are built upon an intelligent system that anticipates faults and provides quick, non-service disrupting recovery to maintain user sessions and provide a high-quality experience. This focus has allowed us to gain NEBS Level 3 certification. However, this only marks a starting point for the reliability standards that Starent Networks has set.
Today, when hardware and software faults occur on most products, expect to experience system downtime of up to 10 minutes for required system reboots. Starent Networks has designed service availability features into our platforms such that most failure cases do not result in any downtime, and in the rare event there is downtime, it is usually measured in the range of milli-seconds rather than minutes.
We accomplish this through a system architecture that contains no single point of failure, both for hardware and software resources. All system elements and processes have back up for fail over and recovery; and for session failures, the system provides fault containment that minimizes service impact, as well as session recovery capabilities.
Key Features
- Session recovery
- Fault containment
- State replication
- Task checkpoint and migration
- M:N or 1:1 redundancy for all hardware elements
- Dynamic hardware removal and additions (hot-swappability)
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