Appliances, Appliances

The increasing wealth of Americans in the 20th century led to a proliferation of household appliances - discrete devices that accomplished some specific, routine housekeeping task, such as cooking, food preservation, or cleaning. Appliances such as toasters and refrigerators were a bit over-designed, with rounded surfaces and distinctive features, at least until 1957, says John Jowers of Jowers Appliances in Clayton, Georgia, a company that will sell you a restored, vintage appliance costing anywhere from $2,500 to $6,000. After 1957, things became more boxy, streamlined and “techno”.

There still seems to be an appliance mentality among many people. That’s why, in an effort to capture the small- and medium-sized business (SMB) market, vendors have been developing IT appliances which, like their household brethren, are self-contained systems that can be plugged into an existing IT infrastructure to carry out a single purpose, making them comparable to consumer appliances.

Recently, PIKA Technologies, a vendor of media-processing hardware and software, announced the release of its PIKA Appliance for Asterisk, a smaller-sized and lower-cost alternative to traditional off-the-shelf computers that’s purpose-built for the Asterisk open-source communications platform.

The PIKA Appliance provides developers with an out-of-the-box embedded computer that they can use to deploy Asterisk with a large set of traditional and next-gen telephony features, optimized for SMBs. The unit is essentially a “micro” Key Service Unit (KSU), which means it is imbued with many telephony-based features (e.g. power-failure transfer, audio input for music-on-hold, audio output for paging, etc.) not normally found in the “vanilla”, off-the-shelf PCs typically used to run Asterisk.

In the VoIP environment, the unit accommodates up to a combination of 100 trunks (FXOs) and telephones. Four-port FXS modules (for phones, fax machines, answering machines, etc.) and four-port FXO modules can be used in any combination to a maximum of 8 additional ports for use with either trunks or telephones. Each four-port module also contains a power failure transfer jack (RJ-11).

Developers can “private label” the appliance, giving them some ability to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. For example, Unlimitel will be introducing the PIKA Appliance for Asterisk to its customers in the SMB market.

The unit also has Ethernet and USB ports, a 2x20 LCD display that’s backlit and has a front panel scroll button (the display can be controlled with the API).

In true appliance fashion, there’s even an externally removable SD flash memory card, so you don’t have to worry about hard drive failures. IT

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

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