TMCnews Featured Article

As companies across the globe make the transition to fully unified communications (UC), IT managers are faced with an important decision – what to do about their fax service. IP fax is often the final step toward achieving total telecommunications convergence, and choosing the right IP Fax platform is therefore critical for a successful and complete transition to UC. In response, many companies have embraced fax server virtualization as the ideal way to consolidate and administer their UC resources.

IP Fax server virtualization is the implementation of fax server software in a virtual server environment, such as VMware or Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Hyper-V. Rather than housing a single physical fax server on premise, virtualization allows for many virtualized servers to share processor, RAM (News - Alert) and hard drive resources from a single hardware platform or server farm.

Biscom, a provider of document delivery solutions, lists fax-server virtualization as its first consideration in a free whitepaper titled “Top Ten Considerations When Evaluating Fax Over IP (FoIP),” and for good reason. IP Fax server virtualization allows administrators to save both time and money, by avoiding the costs and maintenance requirements of expensive fax boards. The whitepaper notes that a virtualized server brings about increased efficiency, reduced hardware costs, efficient data center resource management, lower energy consumption, streamlined administration and efficient disaster recovery. Furthermore, virtualization provides easy configuration and soft client version control.

Not every IP fax solution can be virtualized, however. The solution must be hardware independent. That is, they must not require particular pieces of hardware or specific multi-vendor hardware configurations to run. As a software only solution, XMediusFAX, by Sagemcom (News - Alert), can be deployed and administered in any virtual machine environment. This has made it a popular choice for customers, as it seamlessly integrates into existing VMware deployments. 

In addition, XMediusFAX fits seamlessly into backup, data replication, and disaster recovery scenarios. There is no hardware maintenance required, and redundancy is made extremely easy due to its built-in replication capabilities. Moreover, XMediusFAX is boardless, meaning no wasted time or money installing, replacing or repairing expensive fax boards.

So, when looking to take that final step toward adopting UC, soft deployments via IP fax server virtualization may be a good choice.