AVST Blog » High Availability

AVST Has a New Look!

ehatch — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:19:30 +0000

Today, we launched a new website! It’s brighter, it’s easier to navigate, and it’s loaded with new content. Discover the full potential of AVST’s solutions: UC-Interoperability, UC-Voice, UC-Mobile, and UC-Business Process.

Here’s a quick overview:

We encourage you to take a tour and tell us what you think.

Today’s secret word is…CLOUD!

Blog Administrator — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:53:10 +0000

The children’s daytime show “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” which aired in the late 80s to early 90s, started each episode with a secret word of the day. It got children’s attention and was one of the best parts of the show.

In the present IT world, cloud seems to be the “secret word of the day” that gets a lot attention because people recognize how important it is to their IT strategy. There is so much talk about what it is, what the benefits are, when it will be available and who will use it. When cloud is mentioned the general reaction is: I don’t understand exactly how it works or when our enterprise will deploy it – but I want it! Tom Bittman of Gartner said, “I continue to talk with clients who understand the concept of private cloud computing, they think they know it when they see it, but they can’t quite explain it in words.”

Chris Preimesberger of eWEEK.com defined the two types of cloud; public and private. “Cloud, or utility, computing serves up computing power, data storage or applications from one data center location over a grid to thousands or millions of users on a subscription basis. This general kind of cloud — for example, services provided online by Amazon EC2, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com — is known as a “public” cloud, because any business or individual can subscribe. Private cloud computing is a different take on the mainstream version, in that smaller, cloudlike IT systems within a firewall offer similar services, but to a closed internal network. This network may include corporate or division offices…”These smaller cloudlike IT systems are owned by enterprises and are known as “Corporate Cloud.”

AVST is right there in the mix. In fact, we have hundreds of large enterprises already deployed on Private Cloud, participating in all the benefits it offers. CallXpress 8 provides them with the perfect architecture for Private Cloud. Companies are able to manage CallXpress services within a corporate firewall and network that are dedicated to their organization. With the CallXpress platform, customers have a highly available solution with Neverfail™ and survivable Call Servers within their private cloud that assures security and disaster recovery. Customers can also implement virtualization through VMware® vSphere™ 4.There are many benefits to Private Cloud including; centralizing applications within a datacenter, providing remote survivability and having peace of mind knowing your network is secure. Private Cloud is definitely a must for enterprises and companies alike.

So next time you hear “the secret word of the day” remember that the real secret is- AVST can move your company to Private Cloud today! We have hundreds of deployments and all the capabilities available to make it a smooth and easy transition. Now is the time to move to Private Cloud. Once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

Continuous uptime, high availability, Disaster Recovery, high reliability, business continuity…is all we hear about these days.

cland — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 20:19:40 +0000

In my previous job as voice planner for a large enterprise, these terms were of the utmost priority for all the leadership positions in the company. Everything from hallway conversations, all the way up to “all hands” presentations, had this focus. I’m certain that they are being measured by this and that their jobs depended on it. And when you think about it, if you have the technology, why not? Why not utilize what is available today to make sure that your customers can always reach you- no matter what? Organizations today need their messaging systems to continue to answer calls, record messages, retrieve messages, and perform call processing tasks, especially during an emergency or natural disaster situation.

At AVST, we recently held a webinar titled “How to Ensure Continuous Uptime” presented by our Sales Engineer, Mike Bode. In the webinar Mike discussed how the latest release of AVST CallXpress offers a variety of deployment options to support your emergency preparedness and business continuity objectives, such as:

Multi-servers for High Availability
Disaster Recovery through remote Call Servers
Redundant server components
Built-in system reliability

As usual, we received a lot of great questions during the webinar which Mike answered in the live session. One question came from several customers which stood out to me as something that deserves more of an explanation, -I’m sure it will hit home with your organization as well. The question was, “With all this redundancy in place, is it still important to perform periodic backups?”

The answer simply put is, YES. Just like any other mission critical application, periodic backups of CallXpress should be a critical component of any organization’s Disaster Recovery plan.

Although we covered this in the webinar, I thought it would be a good idea for Mike to expound how CallXpress offers a wide range of high reliability, high availability and disaster recovery options. Most of the webinar focused on hardware redundancy and the distributed architecture of CallXpress. What was not covered were some of the more granular software level redundancy options which make up the foundation of any CallXpress deployment. This is what he told me:

Automated Backup

CallXpress makes a complete system backup of the System Server and each Call Server to the Online Backup location every day during the Daily Maintenance routine. A complete Online Backup of CallXpress is comprised of the following pieces:

Daily Maintenance backup of the System Server
Daily Maintenance backup of each Call Server

Backing up CallXpress consists of the following activities:

Configuring the CallXpress File Manager service on the System Server and the Call Servers with administrator-level logon rights.
Configuring an Online Backup Location
Running a scheduled or a complete Daily Maintenance on the System Server and the Call Servers to create an Online Backup of the system database. The scheduled Daily Maintenance routine automatically backs up the following every time it runs:
- System Data
- Mailbox configuration data
- Name recordings, greetings, announcements
- Local store messages
- Message tracking data
- Registry data
- Report data

Maintaining a current and complete System Backup at the Online Backup location will support a high rate of survivability and availability.

Daily Maintenance can be scheduled to run on a regular basis. If the customer has configured an Online Backup location, the backup will also be performed at that time. Alternatively, Daily Maintenance can be manually invoked at any time. Furthermore, when running Daily Maintenance manually, a Complete Backup or a Backup without messages can be selected.

When configuring the Online Backup location, the following parameters can be defined:

Report Data Retention
Message Retention
Greetings, Names & Announcement Retention
Diagnostic Log Retention
Speech Utterance Retention (ASR enabled only)

All parameters can be set between one (1) and sixty (60) days. Once the parameters have been defined, CallXpress will automatically maintain “X” number of days of backups.

If you’re interested in learning more about the backup capabilities supported within the CallXpress application, a complete overview can be found here.

In my next blog post I’ll talk about using monitoring and diagnostics to proactively monitor the health of the system

Remember, if you cannot find something you are looking for on our website, or you are not sure who to contact, you are always welcome to send questions. Simply email us at info@avst.com, and we will have the appropriate person send you an answer.

How to Modernize Your Voice Infrastructure Today

cland — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:14:08 +0000

Another year is coming to an end, and most companies are still facing financial constraints. They know they must do something with their aging infrastructure in order to replace some of their legacy equipment and centralize. And yet there is nothing left for telecommunications after all the IT budget cuts. What to do? Three or four years ago, companies realized that they needed new infrastructure. It was in everyone’s budgets to get rid of some of the legacy equipment and this was happening at a good pace. Then of course, the economy tanked and unfortunately what that did was take all the funding away, but still left all the pressures. When you have of all these things that people are asking you to do, and you are looking at your budget, and the numbers are just not matching, don’t give up hope; give AVST a call. It is amazing how much we can do with the infrastructure you have today to at least get you started delivering some core pieces, some really visible changes in what you offer your users, without requiring you to forklift all of your legacy equipment.

A few weeks ago, AVST held a webinar titled “Modernize Your IT Communications”, hosted by our Director of Sales Engineering, Neil Butler. In the webinar we discussed how AVST bridges the gap between historical IT and telecom investments and the new IP-enabled world. Their flagship product, CallXpress 8 is the leader in interoperability enabling enterprises to economically integrate and deliver UC solutions across a rapidly evolving infrastructure. CallXpress 8 delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, and personal assistant, speech, fax, and notification capabilities.

Click here to view the archived webinar

The 8 Critical Capabilities for Building your Campus Communications to be presented at ACUTA

Blog Administrator — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:35:14 +0000

At the ACUTA the 39th Annual Conference & Exhibition today, Hardy Myers, President & CEO of AVST, will be giving a corporate presentation titled “The 8 Critical Capabilities for Building your Campus Communications.” Mr. Myers has more than 18 years of profit and loss and financial management experience in telecom, automotive, aerospace, defense and public accounting environments. Prior to AVST he served in top executive positions at CentreCom, UMC, Safety Components IValentec, and Price Waterhouse.

The presentation is expected to identify and weigh the critical capabilities in building a campus communications infrastructure. Mr. Myers will identify how CallXpress 8 meets each of these essential requirements

Architecture
Scalability
High-Availability Options
Unified Communication (UC) Integration Capability
Mobility Options
Management
Diagnostic and Remote Support
Open Standards
Midsize Enterprise Support

Why upgrade to CallXpress 8?

Matt Sawyer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:46:31 +0000

So you’ve heard the buzz….CallXpress 8, AVST’s next generation feature-rich Unified Communications platform delivers high availability, scalability, centralization, cost savings, mobility and more. But what does this mean to you?

It means that CallXpress 8 delivers the mission critical functionality you have been looking for while protecting your current and future communications infrastructure.

Here are the some of the highlights of CallXpress 8:

High Availability and Disaster Recovery – New, multi-call server architecture delivers continuous high availability and avoids system downtime. A multi-server architecture combined with Neverfail®, a fully synchronized hot standby, provides IT administrators with the peace of mind that CallXpress is running 24×7.
Centralization – CallXpress 8 provides customers with the ability to centralize messaging and call processing applications by using their existing voice or data networks and deploying AVST’s survivable call server technology or SIP gateways.
Speech - CallXpress provides speech access to your company’s communication infrastructure and real-time call connectivity. It also offers hands-free mobile management of telephone calls, e-mails, fax messages, contacts and calendar and complies with the hands-free mobile phone laws enacted in many states and countries.
Personal Assistant - Provides Find-me/Follow-me capabilities to automatically route calls to the most appropriate telephone based on their current presence as well as Calendar and Contact management for users of Microsoft® Exchange and IBM® Lotus Notes®. When combined with existing mobility applications such as unified messaging, voice user interface, and single number/single mailbox, CallXpress 8 becomes the most mobility-enabled solution offered by AVST to date.
Scalability – Now able to scale up to 384 ports and 40,000 users, CallXpress 8 doubles the scalability of previous versions and can be networked for larger capacity.
Interoperability – CallXpress 8 is compatible with more than 250 TDM, IP-PBX, and Centrex integrations with the ability to support up to 10 switches on a CallXpress system.

Understand the Benefits of Upgrading to CallXpress 8

AVST believes it is critical for customers to continually utilize the latest version of software. Proactive upgrades ensure optimal performance, continued feature enhancements, increased stability, and ongoing compatibility with emerging communications technology. Click here to view a feature matrix that lists many of the features available with recent versions of CallXpress.

Related Links:

Tom Minifie Live from VoiceCon Orlando 2009

Blog Administrator — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:02:49 +0000

CallXpress 8 was a HIT at VoiceCon Orlando 2009. Check out the video below of Tom Minifie, AVST CTO, being interviewed by Eric Krapf about CallXpress 8.

Related CallXpress 8 Launch Material:

Achieve High Availability and Disaster Recovery with CallXpress 8

Dana Morio — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:51:28 +0000

AVST products are known for delivering the highest levels of reliability. CallXpress 8 continues the tradition by protecting your most mission critical communication applications 24 X 7. Through a robust multi-server architecture, CallXpress is designed to avoid business downtime, keep users constantly connected and provide IT administrators with the confidence that their system remains healthy.

CallXpress offers a variety of deployment options that support many different emergency preparedness and business continuity initiatives:

Multi-Server
Multi-Server with Neverfail®
Redundant Server Components
Built-in System Reliability

CallXpress 8 High Availability Datasheet