Patent ID: 7870265

Claim:
A system for managing communications sessions, the system comprising: a connection to a network that receives at least one incoming call; a server deployed in two separate tiers, said two separate tiers further including: a stateful tier including at least one stateful server node that stores and manages session state data associated with at least one communications session established for the at least one incoming call, wherein the at least one stateful server tier includes an inmemory database to store the session state data; a stateless tier including one or more applications that provide services to the at least one incoming communication session, including at least one stateless server node that is separate with respect to the at least one stateful server node, said at least one stateless server node having one of the one or more applications that performs SIP signaling, wherein the at least one stateless server node writes session state data to the at least one stateful server node; and a communications protocol enabling coordination of the one or more applications in the stateless tier with the at least one incoming communication session in the stateful tier; whereupon when the at least one stateless server node receives a service request to access the at least one communication session during the at least one incoming call, the stateless server node interacts with the communication protocol to retrieve the session state data, in accordance with a protocol employed to coordinate locking and unlocking of the session state data, from a single stripe in the at least one stateful server node before control is passed to the one of the one or more applications, said single stripe being assigned to an identifier of the at least one incoming call for tracking the at least one incoming call, pass control to the one of the one or more applications, wherein the one of the one or more applications processes the service request by performing a read/lock operation on the stateful tier to use the session state data retrieved from the single stripe, and wherein the one of the one or more applications returns control to the at least one stateless node, and wherein after the one of the one or more applications returns control to the at least one stateless node, the at least one stateless node updates the session state data on the at least one stateful server node with by performing a write/unlock operation on the stateful tier to write changes to the in-memory database that were caused by one of the one or more applications processing; and wherein the at least one stateless node then transmits the messages caused by the processing of the one of the one or more applications.