babyTEL, Copia International, and Commetrex team for high-availability breakthrough

ATLANTA, USA: babyTEL (Montreal), Copia International (Chicago), and Commetrex (Atlanta) have developed a high-availability technology they call "Active-Active Redundancy."

The three technology partners claim that Active-Active technology delivers inbound availability for fax-over-IP calls (FoIP) in excess of 99.999 percent. Although the technology is currently being used for inbound FoIP, it applies equally well to voice (VoIP).

The solution marries technologies from each of the three partners:

* babyTEL provides the T.38 real-time FoIP access and carrier services.

* Copia provides the fax server (CopiaFacts).

* Commetrex provides its BladeWare HMP telephony platform on which CopiaFacts is based

The inbound process begins with babyTEL simultaneously delivering a call to two (or more) redundant servers, which can be in different cities or even countries. The key concept is for one of the Copia servers to immediately accept the call and the other to delay accepting the call...say for 200-milliseconds. The babyTEL service acknowledges the first-arriving call acceptance and cancels the other.

To determine whether to answer a call immediately or wait, CopiaFacts utilizes a special feature Commetrex added to BladeWare, according to Mike Coffee, Commetrex' CEO. "BladeWare will deliver calls to client applications in either the alerting or connected state. So, when a call is delivered to the CopiaFacts server, it can examine call-related data to determine whether to accept the call.

"In this application, each server will be assigned to immediately accept either odd- or even-numbered calls, delaying acceptance of the other half, which, of course, are immediately accepted by the other server, guaranteeing that each server receives half the calls. If one of the servers goes off line, all calls will be awarded to the remaining on-line server, half of them immediately, half in 200-milliseconds."