Mitel Contact Center

Mitel has seen early success over the past year deploying real-time voice (call control) and associated Unified Communications and Collaboration applications with customers using VMware. Our customers are able to deploy the Mitel Unified Communications and Collaboration software, including real-time call control into their virtualized Data Centers the same way they are deploying the rest of their business applications.

Speaking to a number of CIOs and Directors of IT, they are quite comfortable running their critical business applications in VMware.  There are three key benefits sited by our customers that have virtualized their voice applications and they are a common applications deployment practice, a consistent management methodology and a single business continuity and disaster recovery plan. All three contribute better skill set utilization of existing staff, lowering costs and improved business agility.

First, let’s talk about how important it is to have a common application deployment practice.  Many businesses have invested lots of time, money and resource into reducing the hardware footprints in their data centers and building business processes surrounding application deployment. In addition to the savings gained in fewer servers deployed, these investments also yield big returns in the form of reduced power and cooling requirements in the data centers or server rooms. It also greatly improves the speed that IT is able to test and deploy applications.  Mitel applications come packaged in standard OVF, (Open Virtualization Format). We provide engineering guidelines for CPU, Memory and space requirements. By delivering our applications in this manner companies can capitalize on the above mentioned practices and build on the savings because Mitel does not require them to do anything differently for our voice applications,  (i.e., no special hardware required, no time consuming P2V or physical to virtual conversion and no additional training required for server administrators).

Once applications are deployed, they need to be managed. VMware provides a rich set of management tool as part of vSphere. Mitel supports the complete set of tools in vSphere. I would like to highlight a few of those tools most commonly used by our customers: vMotion, DPM (Distributed Power Management) and Virtual Appliance Deployment. vMotion allows you to move a running VM, virtual machine, from one host to another. This is very useful if you need to perform routine maintenance on a host machine. You can move the virtual machines to another host, perform the maintenance, then move the VM back without disrupting service. DPM (Distributed Power Management) provides additional power savings by dynamically consolidating workloads during periods of low resource utilization. Virtual machines are migrated onto fewer hosts and the unused hosts are powered off. Virtual Appliance Deployment allows you to take a packed vAPP and import it into your virtual server fabric greatly reducing installation time.

A business’s lifeblood depend on systems availability, especially your communications systems. Businesses invest significantly in planning and building business continuity and disaster recovery plans. I sincerely doubt a CIO or an IT director is going to be thrilled by having to do this twice or worse differently because an application requires specific hardware and has a separate management platform to deal with, not to mention the added costs and process that will have to be added. As I talked about above, Mitel leverages the vSphere suite of management tools provided by VMware. (HA) VMware High Availability and (SRM) VMware Site Recovery Manager are part of that suite of tools companies can leverage for Business Continuity and Disaster recovery.

vSphere (HA) High Availability provides automatic failover protection against hardware and operating system failures within your virtualized IT environment by monitoring virtual machines to detect operating system and hardware failures. If a failure is detected (HA) restarts virtual machines on other physical servers in the resource pool without the need for manual intervention. It also protects applications from operating system failures by automatically restarting virtual machines when an operating system failure is detected. (SRM) VMware Site Recovery Manager allows you to restart your virtual machines at a backup site providing geographic redundancy for your mission critical business applications and deliver on service levels, (i.e., RTO and RPO (Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives)).

In summary, Mitel delivers world class Unified Communications and Collaborations systems and they can be deployed today in your virtualized data center. But it is more than just being “virtualized”. It is about delivering these high value applications leveraging a consistent, cost effective and highly available methodology.

Stephen Brown 

Vice President of U.S Systems Engineering 
Mitel 

Stephen is responsible for the consultative design and engineering support for Mitel’s product and applications portfolio to our extensive network of business partners and U.S. based sales force. Stephen is responsible for a team of over 60 professional men and women.

Prior to joining Mitel in 1996, Stephen worked in the integrator space designing and installing many comprehensive voice and data networks. At Mitel, Stephen served in many roles ranging from technical support, systems/sales engineering, business development, and strategic alliance management. He has consistently contributed to optimizing performance levels, driving business growth, facilitating key alliances, and defining and implementing strategic technology-driven solutions.

Stephen began his career in communications in 1990 after a three-year commitment to the U.S. Army. He served with the 37th Engineer Battalion (Combat) (Airborne); achieving the rank of (E-5, Sergeant, Non-Commissioned Officer).