Beyond Asterisk High Availability (HA) Solutions

High Availability (HA) Asterisk solutions, once reserved for mission critical deployments, are now a part of every normal setup. With VoIP, clustering solutions depend on moving the IP traffic to a working server. Setting up a main and standby Asterisk system allows continuous availability of such a working Asterisk system. But telephony is more than a data system using IP traffic and such an HA arrangement is inadequate in ensuring the continuation of all the on-going calls at the time of the hardware or software failure.  Going beyond this high availability for Asterisk, is the patented call survival method (US Patent US 20110310773 A1) and system that keeps calls alive while providing high availability.

A call center software manages hundreds of calls in different queues, connecting them appropriately. The call center ACD is a layer above the PBX which controls the routing through skills based routing and queue prioritization. When a software or hardware failure is encountered, all the on-going conversations and calls in the queue are lost. HA for Asterisk will get your system ready for future calls. With Call survival, the callers will be able to continue their on-going conversations or calls without the need to re-initiate. Implementation of call survival in call center solutions offers a redundancy beyond the normal high availability solutions implemented for Asterisk based call centers.

High Availability for Large Asterisk based contact centers

Cloud based call center software cater to very large systems. Asterisk is by far the most widely used telephony platform. As a natural evolution, the use of Asterisk in both Cloud and large premise based installations have come a long way. Technology for call center software is to some extent driven by the ‘assemble and build’ mode where various accessory technology element available in software form come together to deliver the final solution. Call center software depends on the underlying PBX technology and other technologies for web, database, SIP, and redundancy. Continue reading “High Availability for Large Asterisk based contact centers”

Load Balancing on Multiple Asterisk Servers

Asterisk clusters

Load balancing in Asterisk can be an overloaded term. In some cases, it refers to spreading calls to multiple servers. In others, it refers to calls made outbound. There are other cases as well. The two cases mentioned are two that are not handled by Asterisk out of the box, and additional software may need to be introduced in order to handle them. In multi-server Asterisk call center installs, load balancing allows calls to be distributed more evenly which prevents overloading any particular server. Continue reading “Load Balancing on Multiple Asterisk Servers”

Language support and Localization for Asterisk based Multi-tenant Cloud Contact Centers

Cloud offering of call center software and infrastructure as a service, catering to on-demand growth,  has greatly simplified the task of setting up a call center operation. Personal computer (PC) and adequate bandwidth are the minimum requirements to get started. Cloud service providers deploying Asterisk based contact centers around the world, take advantage of the language support and localization capabilities within Asterisk. Continue reading “Language support and Localization for Asterisk based Multi-tenant Cloud Contact Centers”

Large Multi-tenant Installations using Asterisk

 

Cloud and managed services are driving the growth of multi-tenant platform for PBX and Contact Centers. The heart of such a platform is the underlying telephony engine. Asterisk is one of most versatile and powerful telephony engine available today. In reality it is a complete communications platform packing the functionality of a soft-switch, a protocol gateway, a media server, and a VoIP gateway. Above all, it is a full function PBX with a very large ecosystem supporting application development on it.

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SIP Proxy with Load Balancing for Contact Centers deploying Asterisk Clusters

 

In larger installations with high concurrent call volume, the contact center ACD manages and controls multiple Asterisk servers in a cluster. Since call volume at any given instant can exceed the capacity of a single Asterisk server, a SIP proxy will serve to distribute calls evenly with load balancing.  The ACD maintains the sequence and order of calls coming to the individual queues, irrespective of the Asterisk servers into which the calls come in. It will route and distribute calls to the available agents based on skills based routing, irrespective of where their phones are registered to. Sophisticated call center solutions offer greater flexibility allowing agents to use any external phone like home land-line phone or a mobile phone or a phone behind another PBX. This is ideal for remote and work-at-home options.

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