One company announces today that it is offering the seamless failover that enterprises require, bringing Asterisk into the carrier class service category.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 8, 2006]

Today, Morganville, N.J.-based Ranch Networks is announcing its 1 + 1 High Availability (HA) feature. The company's appliances for Asterisk servers can now be connected to two servers, one active server and one on standby, so that the phone service won't fail if the server goes down (Ranch Networks does not have data on Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) for Asterisk Servers).

A key feature of the failover process, says Ram Ayyakad, co-founder and CEO of Ranch Networks, is that users all see the same IP address whether they're on the local LAN, in a branch office, or roaming on the public internet.

He adds that Ranch Networks doesn't just monitor the internet connection. "We do various kinds of monitoring. We do IP-based monitoring, check for link level failure, and we do app-level monitoring, based on SIP, where we continuously ping the Asterisk servers, and if we don't hear from the server in a configurable number of pings, we switch to the standby server."

Asterisk servers don't work alone he says. Many are connected to a database for authentication, and to other elements of a business' infrastructure as well. The monitoring appliance needs to be able to find any problem.

Of course, switching to the failover won't solve all problems. If the database is down, that problem needs to be solved first. But the appliance gives the business a strategy for dealing with Asterisk server problems, just as enterprises already have a strategy for handling Oracle database issues, for example.

"We catch as many potential failures as possible," says Ayyakad.

"We're working with customers and Asterisk integrators," adds Dave Gombos, vice president of sales and marketing.

Asked whether Ranch Networks is now marketing the product to a new class of customer, Gombos says that the strategy is, in fact, to make the product more attractive to current prospects.

"People have been hesitant to deploy the IP PBX in their business. Now we can give them QoS and reliability, and we believe that should speed up VoIP adoption."

Pricing and availability
The 1 + 1 HA feature is now available on all Ranch Networks boxes.

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