On Mon, 1 Sep 2008 22:01:19 -0400, "Michael Melia Jr." said: > > I am looking to implement Asterisk in front of the legacy PBX as the new > gateway to the PSTN for the company in an effort to begin a slow > transition to VoIP. While I am familiar with Asterisk when it comes to > implementing it as a single box solution for PRI, SIP, voicemail, IVR, > etc, I get a little confused when you start to separate the functions to > different boxes for redundancy and scalability. >
We're doing something similar, except that we have only 1 PRI. I too am partially in new waters with this project, but we've chosen to buy a RedFone box instead of a complex assortment of PRI cards between MAIN and FAILOVER and LEGACY PBX's. We like the choice because it's simple, highly reliable and gives us lots of flexibility and failover options (available). For example: 1 - It means we don't have to any PRI cards for the asterisk servers themselves--the redfone box wraps the TDM in ethernet frames. The Asterisk boxes need no hardware other than their own ethernet cards. The Redfone box translates the TDM to TDM over Ethernet (TDMoE). Now we can do any *logical* routing we want between Ast1, Ast2 and Legacy without having to establish *physical* routes and interfaces. 2 - The RedFone box has the PRI interface(s) from the Telco, AND to the legacy PBX. The legacy PBX remains essentially unchanged, except that RF routes the traffic to Ast1 (Ast2 if Ast1 is down), and Asterisk can decide which call tasks it wants to handle, and which it will route BACK to the legacy PBX. If we want migrate a number, service, mailbox, IVR etc AWAY from the Legacy PBX, we do so easily with a tiny tweak of the dialplan. If we move something from away from the legacy system, and it turns out to have a problem, bug, etc. (not that my dialplans EVER have problems, but I'm just speaking hypothetically :-) ), I can just send it back with the same tiny dialplan tweak. 3 - In an unlikely double-failover scenario, I can leave all of my legacy IVR trees etc intact on the legacy PBX. If both Asterisk servers are down, the customer is routed to the old system. The customer may wonder why they're hearing the OLD voiceover artist, instead of the NEW voiceover artist but at least the call gets handled :-) This is just another tool to consider. I would be able to report in more detail but at this time but it's a work in progress. If anyone has a RedFone solution in place and would care to report on (from the trenches) I'd be interested in hearing your experience. -Karl _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
