A group got together yesterday with a couple of pizzas for a two hour discussion regarding the LAN topology to be put in place for the SoftPhone project. SoftPhone is the current title of the voice portion of the SIP communications project, coined to indicate a SIP client on a personal computing device used to call PSU IB-wide by providing the UserID of the person with whom you wish to communicate.
The concept is not new and much collective experience exists with SIP. The high level of the project includes several phases, the first phase actually takes a step back from an ongoing field trial where complex customization tied the open system SIP to the legacy VoIP system. I'll provide further details in a next set of posts on this topic.
The meeting -- Mark Linton, Scott Reed, Sven Schulz and I explored some really interesting LAN and some Layer 3 ideas to help move forward with completion of phase one. At the end we had a couple of questions -- one regarding how our edge security plays into the LAN topology -- is answered but we have some further work prior to moving forward. The quick take is we will architect a pair of SBCs to act as firewalls, positioned front and center of the traffic from the rest of the world. We have some design questions for the SBC vendor (Ingate) before deciding on how to best proceed.
These first steps sound important and they are for several reasons -- the phase one time line looms close (don't they all?), our next steps are equally critical -- completing AAA and a front end which needs reworked from the original trial, then some opportunities to talk, listen, sell, and provide additional knowledge transfer.