Typical ORACLE SBC integration into SDM Cloud.

Oracle’s Session Delivery Manager (SDM) product is a centralised management platform. Through a convenient dashboard, SDM facilitates flow-through provisioning, capacity planning, fraud protection and comprehensive performance and fault monitoring.

SDM consists of a base system plus optional management applications. The base system displays detailed information on individual devices such as session border controllers (SBCs).

One such management application is the Oracle Session Element Manager (SEM), which provides configuration, fault, fraud protection and performance management for Oracle SBCs. SEM is used for the configuration, monitoring, statistical data collection, scheduling of bulk upgrades after hours and the archiving of the backup configurations of the SBCs.

SDM Cloud consist of several components that interact with one another to provide the service. The main components include SDM Cloud services, the Management Cloud Engine (MCE) and the Cloud Communication Service (CCS). For most other vendors, the customer needs to buy an additional licence for the end point SBC to enable remote management; however, Oracle includes the CCS and MCE software as part of their offering.

The MCE and CCS reside on-premises. One can install the MCE and the CCS, which are Docker images, on either the same virtual machine or on separate ones, depending on the requirement and hardware availability.

The CCS is deployed in the DMZ because the CCS performs secure communication from cloud-to-ground and ground-to-cloud. The MCE provides the protocol conversion from legacy NF to cloud-centric REST-based APIs. MCE is deployed in its own environment.

Enter the OR900 SBC platform. No need for an additional VM or server. By integrating the CCS and MCE on the OR900, an elegant and cost-effective solution is ensured. The OR900 is a Teams certified SBC for those larger corporates with offices distributed across the country. It is feature rich, it includes high availability, transcoding, direct routing and a concurrent session count of up to 260 sessions.

The OR900 was initially developed to address the edge SBC requirement in South Africa. The distributed edge SBC architecture (on-premise SBC) not only provides key benefits to the end-customer, but also for the service provider – it is a valuable demarcation point, and assists with troubleshooting on the VOIP network. SDM supports the implementation and management of the distributed edge SBC architecture.

“Our service provider and unified communications integrator customers needed a cost effective, Teams-certified SBC for the branch offices. Thus, we developed the OR900 that can scale down for offices as small as five Teams users. And now, with the addition of these new features, we are proud to enhance the OR900 product,” says Tjaart de Wet, Managing Director of Q-KON SA.

An additional advantage of the Oracle SDM solution is that the SDM Cloud service resides in the Oracle Cloud, is subscription based and therefore no need for a capex investment into an expensive centralised platform.