Cisco High Performance Gatekeeper

Cisco High Performance Gatekeeper

The Cisco High-Performance Gatekeeper feature introduces new gatekeeper functionality and modifications for facilitating carrier class reliability, security, and performance into the Cisco Voice Network solution portfolio. These H.323 standard-based features have carrier grade reliability and performance characteristics with a robust open application protocol interface to enable development of enhanced applications like voice Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and wholesale voice solutions.

The new gatekeeper is characterized by the following:

*Increased support for back end applications.
*Increased performance on a single gatekeeper.
*Alternate gatekeeper support to the gatekeeper. Each alternate gatekeeper, or GK node, shares its local zone information so that the cluster can effectively manage all local zones within the cluster. Each alternate gatekeeper has a unique local zone. Clusters provide a mechanism for distributing call processing seamlessly across a converged IP network infrastructure to support IP telephony, facilitate redundancy, and provide feature transparency and scalability.

This feature addresses the scalability, redundancy, and performance aspects of the gatekeeper as part of the Cisco Multimedia Conference Manager (MCM) to present a complete Cisco solution. The Cisco H.323 MCM provides the network administrator with the ability to identify H.323 traffic and to apply appropriate policies. The Cisco H.323 Multimedia Conference Manager is implemented on Cisco IOS software and enables a network manager to do the following:

*Limit the H.323 traffic on the LAN and WAN.
*Provide user accounting for records based on the service utilization.
*Inject quality of service (QoS) parameters for the H.323 traffic generated by applications such as VoIP, and data and video conferencing.
*Provide the mechanism to implement security for H.323 communications.