Intelligent ShoreTel Voice
Switches Ensure VoIP System Reliability
ShoreTel's ShoreGear Voice Switches
are designed to peer with each other to create a robust Enterprise
VoIP phone system.
Enterprise VoIP telephone systems have a lot to
live up to. Traditional TDM based telephony has a development
history spanning many decades of refinement. The gold standard
of system availability is commonly accepted as "five nines"
or 99.999% uptime. Any replacement for PBX and Centrex based
phone systems has this lofty expectation to contend with.
The Value of Distributed Processing
ShoreTel takes on the reliability challenge with an approach
used by high reliability military and aerospace systems. It's
redundant distributed processing. The principle is to avoid putting
all your apples in one basket. Murphy's Law says that if there
is a single component that can take your system down, that's
the one that's going to fail and probably at the worst possible
time. Designers of high reliability systems avoid single point
failures. If something goes wrong, there needs to be another
piece of equipment that can take up the slack.
Actually, that's the way the Internet was
designed. There are many routers, each with many routes to choose
from, distributed over a wide geographical area. You can cut
any line or knock out any router and the Internet will automatically
compensate. The worst that happens is that traffic will slow
if demand exceeds the resources available.
Automatic Fail-Over
ShoreTel's ShoreGear Voice Switches aren't single point PBX phone
systems. The switches are designed to communicate and coordinate
with each other to create an IP PBX phone system that is distributed
throughout the company. If you knock out one of the switches
or it is unreachable due to a local network failure, its peers
will take over its tasks to ensure that call processing continues
uninterrupted. The same is true of IP phones being handled by
that switch. They automatically fail over to another switch at
the site.
What about trunk line faults? Multiple
ShoreGear-T1 switches will provide PSTN connectivity even if
one T1 or ISDN PRI line goes down. Outgoing calls will be picked
up by the working ShoreGear gateways.
Ease of System Expansion
System expansion is accomplished by adding additional ShoreGear
Voice Switches to the network as demand for phones and phone
lines increases. This includes adding additional business sites
on the network. As more switches are added, they peer to provide
a robust distributed phone system.
The design of the ShoreGear Voice Switches
is geared to support five-nines availability. The boxes are completely
solid state, using flash memory rather than mechanical hard disk
drives to store data. The operating system is a high reliability
embedded real-time control OS called VxWorks from WindRiver Systems
rather than the standard PC or server operating system.
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upgrade or new installation?
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