Taking the plunge into an opensource phone system can be a little unnerving, even for the most opensource of us. It's one decision I have never regretted!
About four years ago, we started looking into single points of failure around the company. The phone system is an integral part of our day to day business and it's the one area that lacked redundancy. At the time, we were running a Cisco 7750 CallManager with 115 extensions on Cisco 7910, 7940 and 7960s. The cost to duplicate the system itself to prevent a long term outage was high enough that we were never going to see the funding. So we started looking for alternatives.
After searching the net for a while, we stumbled on a little project called
Asterisk. Asterisk is released under the
GPL, so that means free! I don't think it was even at version 1.0 at the time, but we decided to start testing. After a few weeks of playing, we had about 75% of the Cisco system duplicated and it was running on my laptop. The Cisco CallManager was at version 3.x and ran on three separate blades. One had the phone system portion, one held "Unity" which was the voicemail part and the last was the T1 card. We also had external equipment to handle the music on hold. And I mean CD changers, external USB sound cards, etc... And all of this wrapped around a single PRI and a few FXO and FXS ports to support the paging system.
Continue reading "To Asterisk, or not to Asterisk..."
