Marteleron

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In searching for a server platform to develop and deliver IPJunction, its new service for the telecom industry, Marteleron had no margin for error with its choice of hardware. Continuity of service, performance, and reliability are required in the telecom vertical, and meeting those needs would be critical to the success of the company. As a service, IPJunction will enable direct connectivity between gateway carriers. Specifically, it will bypass the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and route VoIP calls, text, and video directly to their destination gateways over IP. A centralized gateway registry service such as IPJunction is necessary for streamlined connectivity between all carriers.

“Telecom is mission critical,” explains Mario Aluf-Medina, founder and chief operating officer at Marteleron. “In other words, it requires rapid, successful call completion. Think about how frustrating it is as an end user when you make a call, and it takes a second or more to connect or never does.”

In addition to requiring continuous availability and high I/O throughput, Marteleron needed a scalable system that it could easily manage and adapt to future business growth. After researching large-scale solutions from multiple vendors, Marteleron submitted its list of requirements to both IBM and Sun Microsystems in late 2005. After evaluating proposals from both companies, Marteleron decided that Sun Microsystems was the only vendor that could provide the performance and reliability needed for its demanding application. Sun could also meet Marteleron’s requirements at significantly lower cost than IBM, an important consideration for the early stage startup.

To help Marteleron get started, Sun loaned the company servers running the OpenSolaris Operating System to develop and test IPJunction. The ongoing support that Sun provided was critical to getting the project off the ground. “Sun held our hands from the beginning by advising us and lending us their machines,” says Aluf-Medina. “It’s extremely valuable to a startup company such as ours, which might not possess the initial capital outlay for this kind of hardware investment.”

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As it prepared for its fourth quarter 2008 launch, Marteleron decided to deploy IPJunction on the Sun Blade 6000 modular system, choosing the Sun Blade 6000 Chassis and the Sun Blade X6250 Server Module. Marteleron wanted the 10-blade, 10RU system because its quad-core Intel Xeon processors offer the memory and I/O capacity that it needed. The company also planned to take advantage of administration capabilities such as Sun Blade transparent management, which enables direct management of each server module. The Solaris 10 Operating System provides even more control and flexibility with Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), a built-in tracing tool. Marteleron can use DTrace to troubleshoot and fine-tune application performance in real time without taking servers offline or affecting performance.

The performance advantages of the Sun Blade 6000 modular system were evident as Marteleron ran IPJunction and tested the server’s speed, large shared memory allocation, and transaction time. With eight separate processing threads per module, the company can handle close to a million queries a second per server. Marteleron expects that the blade server's high-performance level will enable IPJunction to answer each query in less than two nanoseconds — not including elapsed network time from Marteleron to the querying gateway— under any call load. Marteleron reports that this is the quickest processing rate in the marketplace.

The Sun Blade 6000 modular systems will be installed in nine datacenters when the solution is fully deployed across the United States. Marteleron currently has four Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules installed in each chassis and plans to add two more for management. Marteleron expects to increase capacity without significant expenditure or network downtime, and the compact systems will be much easier to manage than multiple rack-mount servers. These benefits, in addition to the servers’ efficient use of space and energy, add up to savings that Marteleron can pass on to its customers. With assistance from Sun Microsystems, Marteleron is prepared to help communication carriers benefit from IP networking.