Considering IP Telephony? Don’t Overlook Disaster Recovery

As you consider which IP telephony system to choose for your organization’s needs, remember that unplanned downtime—whether it results from a sprinkler system that malfunctions in your head office to a Category 5 hurricane that temporarily knocks out an entire region of the country—is all but inevitable. Preparing to recover your voice system from an irritating inconvenience or a full-blown natural or man-made crisis must figure in your consideration of the various IP PBXs on the market. Here are six considerations to help you build your disaster recovery plan for your IP phone system.

1. Highly Reliable Architecture. First, you’ll want to choose a voice system with a highly reliable architecture—reliable both from the standpoint of the necessary hardware and that of the operating system and applications running on it, such as auto-attendant and voicemail. System availability, with 99.999% availability widely considered the gold standard, is typically determined by comparing how often system hardware fails to the percentage of time the system is available.

All ShoreTel ShoreGear® switches exceed five-nines in terms of availability. That’s critical when you are planning how to get your business back on track following a disruption.

2. Mean Time Between Failure Availability is also measured by calculating the mean time between failure (MTBF) of hardware components in the voice system.

For instance, the MTBF of today’s ShoreTel IP telephony system is about 135,600 hours, with one hour of time required to repair each failure. Thus a typical ShoreGear switch’s reliability will run in the 99.9993% availability range. In other words, a ShoreGear switch will on average be down for one hour every decade. Yet ShoreGear products installed in the field routinely exceed their predicted availability. For example, though the ShoreGear 60 switch has a MTBF of 91,000 hours, its demonstrated MTBF is actually in the neighborhood of 240,000, which yields an availability of 99.9997%.

3. Component Redundancy. Component redundancy will allow failover to another server, room or office in the next state should weather or another incident knock your IP telephony system offline for a while. A backup location in another town with dedicated networking infrastructure is a good place to start plotting out a disaster-recovery plan. Choose your secondary site based on your organization’s size, client base or business coverage area.

Look for an IP PBX that supports N+1 redundancy. With N+1 redundancy, you’ll only need one additional system to backup all of the switches at a site. Some IP telephony providers support NxN redundancy, which means that you’ll need to buy a spare switch for each and every switch at a location if you want to be sure that phone service continues during an incident. NxN redundancy can get expensive fast!

ShoreTel supports N+1 redundancy, which means that one ShoreGear switch can be used to back up any other ShoreGear switch at that site. For example, if a location has six ShoreGear switches, it needs only one additional switch to back up any of the six.

Plus, organizations need not worry about a single point of failure with ShoreTel. In ShoreTel’s distributed architecture, each unit is a peer, with intelligence built right in and system load shared across all units. With ShoreTel’s unrivaled distributed architecture, workload is automatically transferred across the remaining units, which still function normally. Users whose IP phones are networked with each of those units may continue to work unaffected. Dial tone is available continuously. Voicemail comes back on after the appointed backup server takes over. “Watchdog” products like DoubleTake and XLink ensure that backup scenarios like these are executed smoothly.

4. Ability to Work Remotely. If an event precluded workers from working in their usual offices and using their usual ShoreTel phones, ShoreTel’s Office Anywhere feature simplifies the process of working remotely. Office Anywhere gives users who must suddenly and temporarily work from home or a remote office the ability to go to another telephone on or off the network, log into a voicemail box, and assign a ShoreTel extension to an external phone number that can be a cell phone or land line.

5. Network Redundancy. Next, think about network redundancy. Keep in mind that due to Quality of Service (QoS) issues, LANs and in particular WANs have lower reliability than do telecommunications systems like the PSTN. As such, you’ll want an IP telephony system that links both to the PSTN and backup WAN connections, which will permit the automatic re-routing of calls should a network become unavailable. ShoreTel’s distributed architecture provides seamless and complete call control at remote sites even when a WAN fails.

6. Backup Power. Lastly, you’ll need a plan for power backup to the office. ShoreTel IP telephones use power over Ethernet. If the organization rolling out IP telephony has redundancy built into its data network, the phones should still work if the power fails at the site. But if IP telephony switches go offline because servers go offline, IP phones will not work. Thus, a backup power source for the network is essential. For organizations with large physical plants, this may be less of an issue. Mid-sized or smaller companies that load up electrical outlets with copiers, printers and other gear must ensure that they have adequate power supplies in place to keep their IP telephony system online in the event of a power failure.

As you consider the move to IP telephony and how your organization would recover from a small power outage or a large-scale natural disaster, keep these considerations in mind. The preparation of a plan that will guide your organization is more than just a theoretical exercise—it’s common sense.