[asterisk-users] Small site survivability

[Gordon Henderson]

On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Jonathan Thurman wrote:

> We are currently moving away from a wide-spread Cisco CallManager deployment
> to Asterisk.  For many of our small sites we have the routers configured for
> what Cisco calls SRST so if we have a WAN failure, the router acts as a SCCP
> registrar.  We are converting to SIP, and from what I can tell Cisco wants a
> license for each router to run SRST over SIP...
>
> So my question to the group is: What are you doing for survivability in
> these small (6-30 phone) sites?  I would like to avoid deploying a lot of
> servers if at all possible.  The requirements would be a simple, easy to
> manage device for the phones to register to in case of WAN failure with 1 or
> 2 POTS lines attached (also used for 911 calls from that site).  Thanks for
> any suggestions!

Deploy a lot of small asterisk based appliances...

This way you can completely decentralise your setup and give each office 
it's own autonomous system, only needing the WAN links for inter-site 
calls (and maybe your backhaul to the PSTN)

30 phones will trivially work from a diskless, fanless, processor, so no 
need for anything too clever. If building them yourselves the cost per 
site ought to be under $600 for the hardware (Under £400 where I am, so 
apply conversion rate) you could use one of the pre-built packages for 
this - pbxinaflash, or buy something like an Atcom unit, etc.

Gordon