HAAST: High Availability Clustering for Asterisk

Asterisk Open Source PBX continues to march along, supported by a community of thousands of active developers. The appeal of Asterisk as a foundation for voice communications has transcended first adopter and Linux devotees. Today even large, traditional enterprise users are taking a long hard look at open source as they struggle to afford to maintain their proprietary TDM and IP communications infrastructure from vendors like Cisco, Nortel and Avaya.

Although Asterisk is inherently versatile and can service the needs of many different types of users including small businesses, large businesses and call centers, one of it’s traditional weaknesses has been a lack of easy scalability and failover capability. There are several methodologies for “clustering” Asterisk servers to beef up fault tolerance and promote survivability, but they are neither well documented or easily supported.

London, Ontario, Canada based Generation D Consulting has taken a “software only” approach to solving the Asterisk High Availability issue. Their High Availability ASTerisk (HAAST) is a software based solution which allows for the creation of a high availability / clustered group of Asterisk servers, able to act as a single server. According to their website, HAAST can detect a range of failures on any single Asterisk server and automatically transfer control to another Asterisk Server, resulting in a telephony environment with minimal down time.

HAAST is a 100% software solution, with switchover in as little as 10 seconds. Built-in intelligent network control allows for a single IP address shared between multiple servers, so clients/phones automatically connect to the Asterisk server in control. Built-in automatic replication of configuration between servers also reduces maintenance and support activities.

HAAST is an easy to use solution, with shell (command line), telnet, and web interfaces, suitable for beginners and experts alike. HAAST is ideal for demanding telephony environments like call centers and mid-to-large size businesses.

Features Include:
Automatic failover detection
Manual failover and control:
OS and Hardware compatibility
Asterisk compatibility
Security
Web interface
Telnet interface
Shell interface

According to the vendor, HAAST is simple to install and integrate into an existing environment. Use of only standard services, protocols, and API’s helps avoid surprises.

Has your organization implemented Asterisk in a High Availability, Fault Tolerant environment? If so, we’d love to hear about it.