Avaya offers wide array of unified communications wares

The company offers a dizzying array of UC products that enterprises can piece together to craft customized systems grounded in the company's long, solid telephony history. That said, integrating all the pieces together takes a lot of effort and may require a great deal of assistance from Avaya and its resellers.

This Clear Choice Test is the first in a series of reviews that examine the facets comprising enterprise UC platforms.

Our hands-on evaluation of a 2,500-users Avaya UC deployment included an example of each of Avaya's one-X suite of UC endpoints including hard phones, softphone clients, smartphone clients and a Web portal interface. These clients were connected to redundant S8730 IP PBX/communications servers running a hardened version of Red Hat Linux and Communication Manager 5.1 software.

In the test bed's main office configuration, we employed Avaya's SES SIP server to perform standards-based SIP call set-up and routing, which worked in tandem with the S8730 servers. The servers were also connected to a G650 Media Gateway, which provided media translation (G248, H323 and SIP), SIP trunking and other voice gateway functions. According to Avaya, this configuration is capable of supporting up to 36,000 users, including 16,000 IP end points.

As our branch office UC link, we tested the Avaya G450 media gateway, equipped with embedded S8300 blade communication servers, also running Communications Manager 5.1. This configuration is capable of supporting up to 450 users

source : http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2008/090808-avaya-unified-communications.html