Avaya displayed its new Collaborative Pod at VMworld 2012. The approach allows for the delivery of Unified Communications and Contact Center applications in a virtual environment. Interested? Here are some more points of interest:
- Everything runs on virtual machines over vCenter.
- Top of the rack delivers 10 Gigabit switching.
- Media gateway allows for DSP resources and PSTN access.
- On top of vCenter you can deploy other needed management services such as utility or element management.
- Includes KVM Ewitch and Compute Servers, which are all the Avaya applications.
- Includes Session Border Control, an SIP firewall
- Storage is running on an EMC VNX
Without having to integrate each element individually, Collaborative Pod is designed to be a complete turnkey solution for rolling out UC and CC in the enterprise. In lab tests, Avaya hasn't seen any differences between running the services in a virtual environment or running them in a standalone environment or on proprietary hardware.