Sippy Softswitch Hardware Specification Guidelines

Be sure to secure reputable name brand hardware.

KVM access is required for Sippy Support to access your server for installation and upgrades.

** A note about Real CPU cores, versus Hyper-Threads or Virtual Cores

Our documentation states “physical cores” - this makes the use of virtual or hyperthreading cores contradictory to our recommendations.

For example, the Intel E5-2690 processor is marketed as having 8 physical cores and 16 virtual cores or “Threads” - this CPU counts as having 8 physical cores.

Sippy Softswitch

The figures below are based on synthetic and real-case performance tests with signalling traffic only.  Features that decrease call processing performance were disabled during tests.  The Sippy Softswitch has a built in media relay; be aware that utilizing media relay comes with a trade off in capacity; this is an important consideration before procurement of your hardware. 

Note:  If you experience audio quality issues after reaching ~60,000 PPS throughput traffic (600-700 Active RTP sessions), then an Intel PRO\1000 Network card should be used instead of currently installed.  

Media Relay Scaling

In our baseline testing we have calculated that using the built in media relay and SIP signalling, 3-4 physical CPU cores are fully utilized by RTPproxy processes approaching limits of 1000 CC and 20 All Out CPS; when this is scaled to 2000 CC and 30 CPS we suggest 16 physical Cores.

Conversational traffic pattern with low-to-medium CPS rate (high ACD and ASR stats)

75 CPS 2,000 Concurrent Calls Spec guideline

90 CPS 3,000 Concurrent Calls Spec guideline

135 CPS 6,000 Concurrent Calls Spec guideline

200 CPS 8,000 Concurrent Calls Spec guideline

300+ CPS 10,000+ Concurrent Calls Spec guideline

WBC - Write-Back Cache
BBU - Battery Backup Unit

International and Call Center traffic pattern with medium-to-high CPS (low ACD and ASR stats)

150 'All In' 225 'All Out' CPS 1,200 Concurrent Calls Spec guideline

Sippy Media Gateway (SMG) hardware guidelines 

The relay or proxying of media through an intermediary system is useful for some specific scenarios, such as NAT helping and network topology masking.  Relaying media will increase demand on network requirements, bandwidth and CPU resources.

Media Relay causes the RTP stream between your client system and your vendor to travel via your Sippy Softswitch infrastructure.

The type of codec used by your client and vendor has a large impact on the resources consumed.  Here is an example of the relation between bandwidth use, Call Capacity (CC), Calls Per Second (CPS) and two different (popular) codecs:

Codec / Bandwidth usage examples

Furthermore, the characteristics of traffic using the same codec can vary.

For example, the packetization window of a codec at 10msec will have a throughput of X and bandwidth usage of Y.  If the packetization window is changed to 20msec, then the throughput changes to ~A and bandwidth usage to ~B.

The point to remember here is that all media traffic, even using the same codec is not always equal in terms of the resources required to relay it.

Low spec SMG hardware suitable up to 40 'All Out' CPS 2,000 Concurrent Calls 

Example of SMG hardware specs stable under 60 'All Out' CPS 3,000 Concurrent Calls, 180 sec ACD, 240,000 PPS and 128 MBit/sec

Sippy Media Gateway (SMG) Cluster solution
 

Several Sippy Media Gateways (SMG) can be aggregated into an SMG Cluster solution to provide redundancy and load balancing between SMG nodes.  If one SMG node goes down, the SMG Cluster will continue operating.  The load will be shared between existing the SMG nodes available in the SMG Cluster.  Also, if the SMG Cluster Maximum CC capacity is reached or all SMG nodes go down, the remaining media sessions will be proxied through the Built-In RTPproxy service available in the Softswitch itself until the SMG Cluster is back online.

SMG Cluster is a beta product, and only available to enterprise customers participating in our beta program. If you wish to take part in this program, please contact [email protected]

Sippy Sandbox Solution

Sippysoft provides an ability for the existing customers with a "Full Purchased" solution to order a Sippy Sandbox Solution . 

Minimal hardware specs for Sandbox license are provided below. 
BTW, we use the same hw specs on our Digital Ocean Droplets.