High Availability for Asterisk

Compare HAast to alternatives

HAAST

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COMPARISON

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HAast
Product A
Product B
Product C
Product D

Peer Autonomy

No shared physical devices
No shared logical devices
Support unique peer configurations
Critical resource isolation

Synchronization

Config, data, and voicemail files
Asterisk® internal database
No sync if detect peer unhealthy
No sync if detect corrupt data
Intelligent merging of data after reconnection

Peer Health / Failure Detection

Asterisk® process awareness
Intelligent Asterisk® testing
Hardware health awareness
External environment awareness
User defined health scoring/rules

Geographic Separation

Capable of local (inter-data center) separation
Capable of wide (intercontinental) separation
Automatic WAN network latency compensation
Adjustable LAN/WAN network latency control

No Single Point Of Failure

No imposed shared utility/communications
No dependance on shared physical device
No dependance on shared logical device

Encryption

Encrypted control traffic
Encrypted data exchange traffic
Encrypted file storage network traffic
Yes/Excellent
Partial/Fair
No/Poor

Comparison Details

The following boxes provide further comparison details, and by clicking the down arrow at the bottom of each section you can see how HAAst performed.

Peer Autonomy

Peer autonomy describes the degree of independence and isolation of peers. Peers in a cluster should be fully autonomous, not sharing any logical or physical devices. If peers share any logical or physical devices then failure of the shared device immediately shuts down the entire cluster. Clusters must also allow for differences in peers (including hardware, OS, drivers, network, and Asterisk configuration) to ensure peers can operate in dissimilar data centers while still sharing configuration data.

HAast is the only high availability product which does not share any logical or physical devices between peers. All other products share USB-based trunk/channel banks (e.g. Xorcom TwinStar, Digium R-Series banks), and/or storage (e.g. NFS, SMB, DRBD). Failure of a shared USB based channel bank immediately causes the entire cluster to fail. Failure of shared storage, or corruption of shared storage, immediately corrupts / disables both peers.

HAast is also the only high availability product which allows for minor and major configuration differences between peers (eg: VoIP trunks vs T1 trunks), applying changes to common configurations following synchronization. This allows for cluster members to operate in different data centers, with different trunks, different routes, etc.

Syncrhonization

Synchronization describes how well peers keep critical files and databases in sync, while also avoiding synchronization of corrupt files caused by a failing peer. If peers share file storage (eg: NFS, SMB, iSCSI, DRBD) then a failing peer may corrupt files needed by the healthy peer, resulting in immediate cluster failure.

HAast is the only high availability product which does not use a shared storage device (e.g. NFS, SMB, DRBD or iSCSI). HAast is also the only product to synchronize files / databases only when both peers are confirmed healthy, and only from the active to the standby peer. All other products immediately replicate corrupt files in the event of either peer failure.

Alternative products use shared network storage which is not sustainable over a WAN due to network traffic, or worse, use DRBD to share a logical disk which can become broken (“split brain”) after peers are separated. These solutions risk corruption of data on peer reconnection, loss of voicemails/configuration data, etc. HAast on the other hand applies changes only in one direction, and resolves post-reconnection conflicts based on which peer was active prior to, and during disconnection. HAast is also the only product guaranteed to maintain referential integrity of databases since there is no risk of disconnection of shared storage halfway through an update (HAast performs database-level transactions, not block-level copying of database files).

Peer Health / Failure Detection

Peers are considered healthy when they are able to provide PBX functionality to users. Peer health must consider not only simple factors such as the Asterisk process being alive, but whether Asterisk is bridging calls,