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Benefits and components of the Pexip Infinity distributed architecture

Pexip Infinity is built on top of a distributed architecture which provides:

  • centralized management of any number of Conferencing Nodes in any number of locations
  • ability to deploy conferencing resources where and when required, without service outage
  • significant WAN bandwidth savings in conferences that span locations
  • consistent user experience, independent of the number of Conferencing Nodes
  • increased resilience to temporary network outages
  • ability to use Conferencing Nodes as gateways for point-to-point calls, thus avoiding hairpinning of media back to a centralized data center
  • allocation of licenses from a central pool.

Distributed architecture components

Pexip Infinity distributed architecture is purely software-based and virtualized, running on industry-standard servers. It consists of:

  • a single Management Node. A Pexip Infinity deployment, regardless of size, has just one Management Node. The purpose of the Management Node is to create and manage Conferencing Nodes. The Management Node is in neither the signaling nor the media path of a conference.
  • one or more Conferencing Nodes. A minimal Pexip Infinity deployment will have one Management Node and one Conferencing Node. However, most Pexip Infinity deployments will have multiple Conferencing Nodes.

Configuration and provisioning data is pushed out from the Management Node to all the Conferencing Nodes; diagnostics data and event information is sent from the Conferencing Nodes back to the Management Node. There is never a need for the administrator to manage a Conferencing Node directly. This centralized management ensures that the entire deployment is configured with a consistent data set – the entire deployment acts as a single application.

A Management Node can run on the same host server as a Conferencing Node. Other Conferencing Nodes can run on host servers in the same or different locations, allowing you to create a globally distributed system. You can have two Conferencing Nodes running on the same host server, for example to ensure service continuity during upgrade of one of the Conferencing Nodes, and for maximum performance.

Scaling up

An administrator can easily scale a deployment up by creating several Conferencing Nodes in the same location (i.e. the same data center). Capacity can even be added “on the fly” – Conferencing Nodes can be added in a couple of minutes if more capacity is needed.

Scaling out

A typical Pexip Infinity deployment consists of two or more locations. If a customer has three main offices such as New York, London and Tokyo, and a concentration of users in those locations, it would make sense to deploy Conferencing Nodes in all three locations. There is no limit on the number of locations in a Pexip Infinity deployment. When additional locations need to be added, this can be done “on the fly” while the system is operating, with no impact on service availability.

Application level resiliency

Application level resiliency greatly improves on a conference experience during for instance temporary network outages, as Pexip Infinity will automatically re-establish the conference when the network connection is re-established.