atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Does Cisco have a PBX that runs their IP phones?

You know there is something about having a phone system running on any version of Microsoft Windows/Server, that just seems like a bad idea. Kind of Like Driving across country in car that had 4 flat tires, sure you'll get there but how many times will you have to stop and put air in? There are lots of IP-enabled Traditional PBXs out there, with Great GUI Tools.

I Tell my customers considering Cisco or a Complete IP Phone system how many times in the last year has your network been down? Imagine if everytime it was down you couldn't even make a phonecall to Tech support or call 911?

bf6b5yr
Well said. Uh, what are the 5 nines? Maybe I know but don't know that I know, ya know?

Dustin Owens,
Your analogy would work better if you said four leaking tires instead of four flat tires.
Your last paragraph is the argument I made to the Cisco folks. Phone system rarely goes down. Data network is ready to go at any moment.
Granted, if a PBX had to do the amount of work the typical data network handles, not just in terms of traffic but running so many disparate applications, it would choke too.

Perhaps this should be the new definition for Convergence:
A way for Cisco to make more money (which is fine btw) and forces Avaya, Nortel, et al to follow suit to keep up.

Richard

99.999 percent uptime, the typical minimum for telecom or critical data networks.

Thanks for the replies guys! I have heard that the latest version of Call Manager is Linux based. Does anyone know if it is its own application built for Linux or if it actually installs Linux and Call Manager onto an empty hard drive? Also, were the older versions Windows based?

If you go to Cisco website you can see all the release info on call manager, older versions ran under windows server, 5.0 started to run under linux:

https://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/voice/c_callmg/index.htm

Im a phone guy (21 yrs) that has an MCSE with Security Designation.

Dont make the same mistake I did and get the MCSE certification because then you will go insane with this stuff.

Atleast before I was on the telephone side.

Now? I dont know anything.

IIRC the Prologix is running embedded windows, isn't it?

Also, my company makes one of the best dialers on the market using NMS boards and a Windows 2000 Pro for the server - we have had customers with five 9s. These are used in Collection Call Centers where every minute the dialer is down is lost money - so we can't use a system that won't stay up. One of our customers has our system making 40,000 broadcast messages calls per hour with complex autopay IVR functions - Windows hasn't choked yet. Failure in this case is drive burn out do the the millions of read/writes happening.

Usually any down time is realted to the end user trying to tweak something (like call routing) without knowing what they are doing or stopping services.

What are the pros and cons of Call Manager vs other competing manufactures' IP systems?

I'd imagine one pro is that you could install it on an existing server without the need to buy/lease other equipment.

"I'd imagine one pro is that you could install it on an existing server without the need to buy/lease other equipment."
I'm afraid not, Cisco not only needs a dedicated server, but they need several dedicated servers to support a decent feature set. One server for this feature, another server for that feature and so on!