BlueWave Telecom

BlueWave Telecom

The VoipFlow Architecture Explained

VoipFlow was built with the service provider in mind. This means that we paid close attention to the capabilities that are needed by service providers who are serious about deploying a world-class hosted PBX environment.

We believe that in order to make a business out of offering a hosted PBX based on Asterisk, you need to get away from the notion of standing up a new server for each customer's PBX. Instead we took a more efficient approach and built VoipFlow from the ground up to take advantage of all available computing resources by implementing a virtualization layer that allows multiple PBXs to run securely on the same cluster of servers...in effect a PBX server farm. This approach is more reliable, less costly, and much easier to manage over time. In addition, it allows us to provide "One-Click" PBX deployments that can be up and running in under 60 seconds.

Our key requirements for VoipFlow were:

To build VoipFlow to meet these requirements, we started by looking first at the operating system. Since scalability and reliability are paramount concerns, we chose the proven and popular Red Hat's 64bit Linux distribution. This provides us with the underlying foundation for providing reliable uptime and performance required of a PBX platform.

Next, we looked for a stable and feature rich core PBX engine. Asterisk was the natural choice due to its open source roots, available features, and the fact that it is proven in many real-world deployments. However, Asterisk alone was not able to meet our goals of running in a PBX server farm and offering the level of redundancy and fail-over that the telecom environment demands.

In order to enable VoipFlow to run in a virtual environment and garner all the benefits that a virtual environment brings to the table, we have implemented the OpenVZ virtualization technology. This allows us to run many PBXs on a single server in a very efficient and effective manner.

In a telecom environment, the ability to stay up and running and always providing dial tone to your customers is paramount. We have implemented a custom clustering layer into our Linux/Asterisk/OpenVZ stack to allow real-time failovers to occur in the event of a server going offline for any reason. We monitor the health of all servers in the cluster at all times and if an anomaly is detected we will proactively initiate a fail-over sequence to that servers fail-over node. In addition, each primary server is continuously synchronizing both its files and memory footprint to its fail-over node in preperation for a possible fail-over event. This capability will overcome hardware, network, and human errors and will keep each customer's PBX up and running with maximum reliability.

Graphically, our architecture is represented in the picture below. One important note is that VoipFlow provides the VoIP PBX functionality to run hundreds of virtual PBXs, however, we rely on a third party to provide the origination and termination. In the picture below, all traffic is routed to an origination/termination provider (such as Level3) where the calls are routed to either another SIP based IP phone, or across the third party's PSTN gateway to traditional land line phones.

This architecture has proven to be highly resilient and scalabile in production and allows us to meet our four key requirements mentioned above.




The old way of provisioning Asterisk servers meant standing up a seperate server for each customer. This is a laborious, time consuming method that is not efficient and wastes server resources. A better approach is to virtualize your PBX environment. This has the benefit of more efficient hardware use, better managability, and with VoipFlow's "One-Click" PBX deployment option, you can literally provision an entire PBX and have it ready to configure with phones in under 60 seconds. This is an enormous win for service providers who are serious about providing a world-class hosted PBX environment.

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