Acme aims for middle with new session border controller

Targeting carriers and enterprises seeing rapid growth in VoIP traffic and peering, Acme Packet today released a new, higher performing session border control (SBC) product that it touts as increasing capacity over its existing mid-tier SBC.

Acme’s new Net-Net 4500 can act as an SBC, multiservice security gateway or session routing proxy, depending on product configuration. It’s mostly used, though as an SBC, which handles signaling and media streams involved in setting up and tearing down VoIP calls.

The 4500 represents a capacity and performance upgrade over the existing Net-Net 4250. In an SBC configuration, the 4500 processes up to 160% more messages per second for SIP and other protocols and 100% more media: 64,000 sessions. Acme’s higher end Net-Net 9200, by comparison, is a 7-rack-unit chassis-based system that can grow to accommodate 128,000 media sessions.

“There’s an increase in demand, now and in the future, for increased performance in capacity for VoIP, not just in access networks but also in peering interconnects,” said Jonathan Zarkower, Acme’s director of product marketing. “We see it as a growth path for existing customers. It’s also ideally suited for many next-generation services and applications across all our markets and customer types.”

For the most part, the 4500 does not represent a major change in architecture but rather a significant boost in processing capacity, Zarkower said.

“It adds more capacity and more signaling performance to our basic architecture and allows customers to tailor the equipment they deploy around the services they want to roll out,” he said. “We’ve seen a demand for more processing power, especially among our larger, tier 1 customers where they are seeing rapid adoption of VoIP. They need something more efficient where they can put in one chassis where they might have had to deploy two.”