SUCCESS STORY NovaTel Networks

NovaTel is a leading wholesale provider of voice, data, and facilities services. From its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, NovaTel delivers “big voice” services for election campaigns, emergency services agencies, wholesale carriers, and large retail, technical support, and customer service call-center operations. These customers need extremely high-density voice connections for short duration calls that absolutely cannot be dropped or suffer from low latency. Frequently, voice services also require back-end acceleration capabilities, multilocation delivery, or global call origination and termination features, so NovaTel requires the ability to customize its services for each customer.

NovaTel, a leading wholesale provider of voice, data, and facilities services, was facing challenges with the growing demands of Voice over IP (VoIP) calling features. The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that underlies VoIP and other telecommunication services uses a call setup phase and a data transfer phase, which requires additional processing across the network. As the volume of SIP and VOIP calls grew, it became increasingly difficult to quickly connect large numbers of calls because they had to be routed to the network core before being sent to an outside connection. Automatic dialing systems, which are commonly used in large-scale calling campaigns, also affected call quality. If one customer turned on automatic dialing capabilities, the additional tax on bandwidth often led to packet loss and call degradation for all customers. With higher bandwidth demands on the IP network, NovaTel’s data center had become a chokepoint. It was clear that the data center now had to provide more than just powerful backend computing hosting. It had to become NovaTel’s “front door” to its customers, allowing the company to engage with customers through a wide range of devices and applications.

NovaTel conducted an extensive evaluation of solutions and support capabilities from all leading network vendors and chose Brocade. NovaTel implemented a Brocade fabric architecture for its cloud and voice services. The company replaced multiple Cisco systems with Brocade MLX Series routers in its San Antonio and Los Angeles megaPOPs and at POPs in Miami, New York, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong. Brocade MLX Series routers are designed to meet massive bandwidth demands, support greater virtualization, and deliver cloud services at lower costs than traditional infrastructures. In addition to providing core routing, the Brocade MLX provides inline encryption at wire speed for ensuring customer privacy. It also simplifies integration with NovaTel’s customers’ Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks. Brocade VDX Switches are Ethernet fabric top-of-rack switches featuring 10 GbE ports with 40 GbE uplinks. High performance with low latency eliminates the call degradation issues that were occurring with NovaTel’s old network. Together with Brocade VCS Fabric technology, the Brocade VDX Switches simplify network design and operations for cloud services. Using Brocade Vyatta ® 5400 vRouters, NovaTel gained the flexibility to build multitier networks within a virtualized environment. The Brocade Vyatta 5400 vRouter also features one of the most advanced virtual firewalls available. With Brocade Vyatta vRouters, NovaTel can now deliver voice and application services through a physical, virtual, and cloud network with security and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). NovaTel also uses carrier-grade Brocade ADX Series Application Delivery Switches to easily scale network performance, efficiently deploy new services, and differentiate its services without affecting performance or reliability. Flexible, stackable Brocade ICX ® Switches support latency-sensitive applications with high availability and performance, and NovaTel relies on them for customer deployments.

• Enabled delivery of all core services through a single cloud model
• Significantly increased infrastructure scale, scope, and speed
• Enhanced competitive advantage to win new business and service opportunities
• Greatly increased staff efficiency and productivity

• Customer peering capacity grew ten-fold
• Reduced the burden on the IT team by approximately 50 percent