The benefits that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) can provide to the enterprises are too great to ignore and many have opted to implement complete VoIP communication systems. However, despite the benefits, VoIP still presents certain challenges in terms of security and reliability.

 

In the white paper, Voice over IP Reliability: Architecture Matters, prepared by ShoreTel and available on TMC (News - Alert), the company explores the different elements that must be present in order to obtain 99.999 percent availability of VoIP systems. This type of availability is an absolute must for business continuity and ShoreTel (News - Alert) provides three different approaches for consideration.

 

The Legacy Voice Approach examines the history of legacy voice systems in delivering extremely reliable voice switches and drives the 99.999 percent availability standard that VoIP solutions must be able to match or exceed. However, these systems have inherent challenges of their own such as hierarchical voice silos that operate independently at each location creating a single point of failure at each site.

 

The Data-Centric Approach to VoIP Reliability plays on the convergence or acquisition of voice as it is being turned into another network application. While this appears to be more appealing, the world of data also possesses some legacy baggage such as the fact that each conversation has to be maintained in a constant stream with strict latency thresholds for acceptable voice quality.

 

Finally, there is the VoIP-by-Design Advantage where VoIP architects can start with a blank slate to exploit its fundamental strength in creating a self-healing voice platform. A truly unified voice system can be distributed across multiple sites through a simple peer-to-peer architecture that offers no single point of failure.

 

Access the link above to read this white paper in full to understand ShoreTel’s compelling argument for how highly reliable VoIP systems can be delivered on any of the three basic architectures discussed in the paper.   

 

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