Aastra Clearspan Architecture

Until now IP telephony systems haven’t been much different than the legacy TDM systems they replaced. That’s because they reuse the same network, distribution and overall architectural concepts of their predecessors. Deploying multiple call managers in multiple locations serving clusters or regions of users results in underused capacity, overburdened networks, complex administration and excess technical staffing.

Enterprise IT applications, on the other hand, are housed in high performance data centers strategically placed for maximum performance and reliability.

Clearspan^® uses this data center centric approach to providing communications services to enterprises. For the first time telephony can be deployed as a global enterprise application just as an enterprise ERP application. Clearspan is implemented in two or more geographically separated data centers that serve the entire organization.

System Level Resiliency
Clearspan is implemented in a fully redundant set of servers with no single points of failure including redundant paths to the network, redundant power supplies and storage. The servers can be implemented in a single BladeCenter^™ chassis in a single data center or they can be implemented in two chassis in geographically separate rooms, buildings or cities.

Service Level Resiliency
Typically one set of servers is delivering the Clearspan services to the enterprise with the second set taking over in the event of a failure. The second set of servers can also provide supplementary services to the enterprise in the event that one or more of the primary servers becomes overloaded or if a subset of users or sites lose connectivity to the primary servers.

Business Level Resiliency
The first two levels of redundancy provide protection from the typical types of failures; hardware, software, power, network, etc. But Clearspan provides a third and potentially more valuable level of resiliency to your business. In additional to the types of protection listed above Clearspan can play a vital role in plans to protect the enterprise from facility, weather, transportation and pandemic events. Using Clearspan Anywhere^™ capabilities users can access Clearspan and communicate normally in the event their normal workplace is rendered inaccessible due to fire, flood, weather, bridge or transportation system failure, and in the event employees' health is in danger from widespread illness.

Clearspan contains a comprehensive application programming interface (API) to allow third party developers to integrate Clearspan into existing business applications, as well as to provide additional value-added services. The Xtended Services (Xsi) API can be used to integrate with back-office systems for managing the Clearspan system, or to create useful mashups or web applications to further enhance business processes. Some of the applications already available using this interface include integration with popular CRM applications, visual voicemail, several desktop applications integrating to other popular programs and much, much more.