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

Application delivery management vendor F5 Networks says it has the answer with the new software release of its BiG-IP Local Traffic Manager that includes built-in support for managing IP applications based on industry-standard session initiation protocol (SIP) messaging and emerging IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) interfaces.

“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, an analyst for Ovum-RHK.

Despite garnering about a quarter of its revenues from carriers, 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 kinds of challenges, said Ken Salchow, manager of core technical marketing for F5.

“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 standards defined that deal with how to make these systems scale,” Salchow said.

The new release of BiG-IP performs application layer switching SIP, real-time streaming protocol and stream control transmission protocol traffic. It also provides traffic management on carrier packet-switched networks.

The system's “secret sauce” is the ability for carriers to write so-called “iRules” governing inspection, transformation and routing of traffic based on service requirements, thereby fixing protocol and application logic problems as a new service is rolled out, said Sergio Verduci, BiG-IP product manager for F5.