Supporting a new service in a test environment of a handful of users is one thing. But what's a carrier to do when it suddenly needs to scale that service across its customer base -- literally millions of users -- overnight?

Application delivery management vendor F5 Networks says it has the answer. On Monday, the vendor will deliver a new software release on its BiG-IP Local Traffic Manager that includes built-in support specifically for managing IP applications based on industry standard SIP messaging and emerging IP multimedia subsystem interfaces.

Despite garnering about a quarter of its revenue from carriers today, F5 is probably best known in the enterprise market, where IT departments use its hardware to manage the delivery of applications via caching, intelligent routing and security capabilities. Service providers rolling out new IP-based services face the same challenges, said Ken Salchow, F5's manager of core technical marketing.

"Carriers are used to dealing with high-availability [on their networks], but often the question of ‘What will happen to this service when we reach a million users?’ doesn't come up early in the process,” Salchow said. “The answer is, ‘We'll deal with it when we get there.’"

The challenge of dealing with new IMS standards and devices in a real-world service deployment environment adds to the difficulty. "There really are no [IMS] standards defined that deal with how to make these systems scale," Salchow said.

“The ability to virtualize processing over multiple service control and application servers provides the scalability and high availability” that new services require, said Mark Seery, analyst at Ovum.

The new release of BiG-IP performs application-layer switching SIP, RTSP and SCTP traffic as well as providing traffic management on carrier packet-switched networks. The system’s “magic sauce” is the ability for carriers to write so-called “iRules” that govern the inspection, transformation and routing of traffic based on service requirements -- fixing protocol and application logic problems as a new service is rolled out, said Sergio Verduci, F5’s BiG-IP product manager.

Here’s an example of iRules in action: One F5 carrier customer wanted to deliver a *67 number-blocking service for its IP voice traffic. The problem was, once the number was “deleted” from the packet flow, the VoIP softswitch had no idea which port to shut down when the call was complete -- resulting in a switch meltdown. To fix it, the carrier wrote an iRule in a matter of hours that held and then re-inserted the number as part of the round-trip call flow.

Third-party service providers are making use of BiG-IP as well. For instance, Rhythm New Media uses the platform to help it deliver targeted video advertising inserts to mobile devices. The advertising company uses the F5 platform to help scale its application while also shielding it from differences in how both carriers and device makers utilize custom RTSP headers on their video streams.

Other BiG-IP additions that should interest service providers include IMS-specific security capabilities and tools to share multimedia traffic.

The multimedia protocol support is available with a software upgrade to 9.4.2 on the 1500, 3400, 6400, 6800, 8400 and 8800 BiG-IP platforms. No additional license is needed. The new release will ship in October.