[hydra-dev] Use cases.

[Tim Panton]

OEJ asked us to outline some thoughts and use-cases for hydra, the thoughts will have to wait 
'till I have had some time with ICE, but here are 2 use-cases where Asterisk fails:

1) Blue light service (I mentioned this in person I think):
	We did some consultancy on the suitability of asterisk as a core for an 
emergency service dispatch system ( 911 style). There were quite a number of
requirements that asterisk can do, but there were 2 things we couldn't do
	a) complex mix/join/whisper/record/monitor combinations that were doable,
		but only with nested meet-me and Zaptel monitoring. I think the bridging API
		would probably let us do this now, but I'm not sure.
	b) live call fail-over. Live calls had to survive a single hardware failure. So if a 
		box in the cluster dies all it's calls would automatically move to the replacement,
		with all the associated behaviour (see a)

2) high availability web service based system.
	I blogged about this last year and spoke at Amoocon.
	We ended up using freeswitch to implement this cluster
		because it was much easier than the same thing in asterisk and required far fewer
		non-standard components and no new programming languages or protocols to learn.
	see: http://babyis60.wordpress.com/2008/12/24/the-importance-of-being-available/
		http://babyis60.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/the-importance-of-being-available-tech-stuff/
		http://www.amoocon.de/talks/26 (tech stuff starts at about 8mins in)

Tim.

Tim Panton - Web/VoIP consultant and implementor
www.westhawk.co.uk