Configure Shoretel For Redundancy, Resiliency Or Business Continuity?

Recently, we have seen growing interest in building "disaster recovery" to provide data and voice applications, so that the key to business operations solutions. First of all, we need to ensure redundancy between our understanding, flexibility, and other configuration options of the difference in order to ensure business continuity. There are now more facilities including a remote "configuration" facilities as an integral part of the installation program and use. What is the best way to configure a ShoreTel based server, such as to provide continuous operation, a wide variety of options.The issue of redundancy is almost funny sometimes. How much redundancy is reasonable and appropriate? You can have your budget all the redundancy fund, but at the end of the day you will be able to take the business further in the event of a catastrophic event. Clearly, two power supplies are better than one. If they both plugged into the same commercial outlet, but it really does not matter how many power supplies, if you lose commercial power! Again, we must focus on what we are trying to protect us?Redundant servers??? Some HQ servers have been configured with “double take” enabling a hot standbye server to take over in the event of a primary server failure.??? Candidly, we do not see the benefit of hot standby server swaps in the ShoreTel architecture and it is a nightmare to administer, backup and restore.? The cost of the solution out weights the benefits and there are other configurations that are more cost effective and work just as well.
For example, there is no law that says you can not install a ShoreTel Distributed Voice Mail server at the same level as the ShoreTel HQ server.?? Actually this works just fine!?? Install the servers at the same physical location, or put the HQ server in the remote “collocation” facility.? If they are installed at the same “logical” level (i.e. appear on the same level in the Shoreware Director, either server can handle the load.?? Generally, you would put all of the users and switches for that site under the DVM and use the HQ as your “fail up” and proxy solution.?? Nothing wrong with this configuration, it is cost effective and easy to administer.? From time to time you might hear ShoreTel say “ please wait while I connect you to the correct server” but even that can be managed.
ShoreTel is headquartered, has not been distributed three services: root point; if the account code and workgroup servers and lose the second office, you typically will lose the flexibility of these services This level of! ShoreTel promise to pay the 10 version, it is a small price, this track is set to achieve the specified reason not to surviability of the building, to distribute these services are still standing.They have not been very long on aThe “collocation” option often requires a trade off between band width and trunk lines.?? You can put all your trunk lines at the colo, in which case every call made from the sites, will traverse a WAN.? So moving the trunk lines to the colo increases resiliency but also drives up your WAN cost.? At the end of the day it is most likely some combination of bandwidth and trunk lines spread between the facilities.? In either case, you will work with your carrier to enable lines to be repointed in the event of an outage.? This is a bit more challenging if you are in New York and your collocation facility is in Phoenix, but it can be done.
We are experimenting with the use of SIP trunk facilities at the Collocation site.? Generally, this can be more cost effective especially if you can get an agreement for a burstable SIP pipe.? You may not want to pay for T1’s at the collocation if you are only planning to use them for a disaster situation!? SIP also enables you to be generally independent of your physical location.
It is a sign of the times that we spend so much time planning for “what if” scenarios, but being prepared is not only prudent but appropriate.