Virtualization Simplifies the Way We Do Business

Datacenters can be very interesting and challenging environments. Due to the drastic decrease in server prices over the years, we went from large monolithic mainframe servers that process many applica­tions to one that utilizes much cheaper and smaller servers used for individual applications.

In modern datacenters, we are now able to virtualize these many servers onto a relatively few physical servers. Although it depends on the type and utilization of a particular application, a normal rule of thumb has shown that we can effectively virtualize 10–15 servers per physical host. For our Unified Communications servers, we are currently able to virtual­ize up to four servers per physical host. However, this capability will certainly increase with each new version.

Lower CAPEX and OPEX

Given that datacenters are incredibly expensive to run (they require expensive real estate, use incredibly large amounts of electrical power, and have high operational costs), virtualization of our datacenters represent a reduction in a company’s Capital Expenditures (CAPEX), but more significantly, their Operational Expenditures (OPEX).

One of the highest operational costs within a datacenter is the servers themselves. Modern single-purpose servers have been shown to only have 5–10% utilization, on average. Conversely, if your servers are using a large per­centage of your datacenter’s power, like 75%, then we have a very inefficient scenario. By virtualizing these serv­ers, we can now combine many servers (10–15) onto a single physical server, which raises the overall utilization significantly and, therefore, lowers the power requirements.

Additional benefits can be seen beyond the reduced power requirements. In a traditional datacenter, many smaller servers generate a LOT of heat, which must be dissipated via cooling efforts. The yearly cooling costs are extremely expensive; but just as bad, strict formulas dictate that we can place only so many servers within so many of square feet in the datacenter. Through virtualization, we are able to place a greater number of serv­ers per square foot of the datacenter with reduced cooling requirements.

Likewise with these other operational costs, cabling represents a HUGE investment in a typical datacenter. For every server that is virtualized, we are able to reduce the physical cabling required to connect that server. Ad­ditionally, when implemented within the Cisco UCS, we are able to take advantage of Unified Fabric and further reduce cabling requirements, since we can send both LAN and Storage signaling over the same cables.

Improved Availability

In a traditional datacenter, if one of your Unified Communications servers crashes, you normally must restart that device manually. This represents a potentially significant outage for that UC device.

When we virtualize our UC servers, we can take advantage of VMware’s great tools like High Availability (HA) and Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

• With HA, the failed virtual server is automatically restarted, which saves a significant amount of downtime, resulting in greater productivity and profits from that server.
• With SRM, we can provide Disaster Recovery by quickly failing over a virtual machine from a main pro­duction site to a secondary site while ensuring the VM remains active.

Licensing

One of the great benefits that we’ll see when virtualizing our UC servers on the Cisco UCS platform is that we can achieve actual platform mobility. On traditional Cisco Media Convergence Servers (MCS), the UC license is tied to the physical server’s MAC address of the primary network interface card (NIC). This means that the instance of the UC application is always tied to that physical device. But what if that server hardware fails?

With the Cisco UCS, we can create Service Profiles that represent the identity of the actual server. We can then “associate” this service profile with any of the blade servers within the UCS 5108 chassis. By doing this, we can simply associate our UC server with a new blade server, if needed. Within Cisco UCS, we are able to build what’s called a “MAC license,” which is based on several configuration compo­nents of the UC server:

1. Time zone
2. NTP server
3. NIC speed
4. Hostname
5. IP Address
6. IP Mask
7. Gateway Address
8. Primary DNS
9. SMTP server
10. Certificate Information (Organization, Unit, Location, State, Country)

Once the MAC license is configured, it can simply be associated with the Service Profile and applied to whichever physical blade server is needed.

Ease of installation in UCS using OVF templates

One of the barriers to entry, when it comes to UC servers, is the general complexity required to build and config­ure these applications properly. There is a considerable learning curve required, which requires the presence or availability of administrators or engineers with these specific skillsets.

With the advent of integrated solutions like the Cisco UCS, the datacenter has undergone a major paradigm shift in our methodology of both design and operational management. Furthermore, with the greatly increased knowledge we have of the consequences of our designs to not only our bottom line, but to the environment as well, we now know how important it is to make our datacenters as efficient as possible while still increasing performance and profitability.

Related Courses
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS
CAPPSv8.0 – Integrating Cisco Unified Communications Applications

Excerpted from GlobalKnowledge.com

For example, a few of these additional server-based resources include:

Cisco Unified Presence

This feature-rich UC component uses standards-based protocols such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Jabber Extensible Communications Platform (XCP) to work with a range of native and third-party client ap­plications. Users are able to initiate such activities as instant messaging, presence, click to call, phone control, voice, video, visual voicemail, and web collaboration.

Cisco Unity Connection

Cisco Unity Connection is a Linux-based appliance that provides a robust unified messaging platform for Cisco’s Unified Communications suite of products. This product allows the user to access and manage voice messages in a variety of ways, using his/her email inbox, web browser, Cisco Unified IP Phone, smartphone, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, etc.

Cisco Unified Contact Center

This powerful set of products comes in two variations:

1. Enterprise — Delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management for large-scale enterprise deployments
2. Express — Designed for midmarket, enterprise branch, or corporate departments requiring a sophisti­cated customer interaction management solution for up to 400 agents

Cisco’s UC products evolved over the years from Windows applications installed on Microsoft Server plat­forms to predominantly appliance-based solutions installed on Linux platforms. The included system, network, and user features increased steadily with each release, but the most dramatic improvements can be seen in the most recent version of the Cisco UC, currently in version 8.x.

UC on UCS Requirements

Cisco supports virtualizing your Unified Communications solutions on the UCS system, according to these require­ments/considerations:

1. Cisco UC applications supported in a virtual environment include:
   1. Unified Communications Manager 8.0(2)
   2. Unified Contact Manager Express 8.0(2)
   3. Cisco Unified Presence 8.0(1)
   4. Cisco Unity 7.0(2)
   5. Cisco Unity Connection 8.0(2)
2. The only hypervisor supported initially is VMware vSphere ESXi version 4.x which includes more of the real-time enhancements required for UC than ESX.
3. Bare-metal/physical/non-virtualized installs are not supported.
4. Dedicated CPU/RAM/Storage is required for the VMs, oversubscription is not yet supported.
5. VMware supported SAN storage is required.
6. 1–4 Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) Virtual Machines per server, dependent on the model, with MCS 7845 parity per VM (7,500 users).
7. Application co-residency is not yet supported – the ultimate goal is “mix and match.”
8. Only “Basic” features supported (e.g., copy VM, restart VM, HA, SRM), “Advanced” features are deferred to future versions (e.g., vMotion, snapshots, DRM, templates, DPM, etc.) .
9. The hardware BIOS, firmware, and drivers are managed by UCS and VMware, not by CUCM.
10. The boot order is controlled by the VMware virtual machine’s BIOS instead of by the CUCM Application.

Related Courses
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS
CAPPSv8.0 – Integrating Cisco Unified Communications Applications

Excerpted from GlobalKnowledge.com

1. Computing
2. Network
3. Storage

Instead of being simply the next generation of blade servers, the Cisco UCS is an innova­tive architecture designed from scratch to be highly scalable, efficient, and powerful with one-third less infrastructure than traditional blade servers.

The Cisco UCS is made up of the following major components:

1. Cisco 6100-series Fabric Interconnects
2. Cisco UCS 5100-series Blade Server Enclosures
3. Cisco 2100-series Fabric Extenders
4. Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers
5. Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-mounted Servers
6. Cisco UCS Converged Network Adapters (CNA)
7. Cisco UCS Manager

Gone are the days of disparate (siloed) systems all across the datacenter with their many different management tools and networking infrastructure. Here to stay is a unified architecture that offers these key features:

Hardware State Abstraction

With Cisco UCS, we can use “service profiles” that represent the physical characteristics of a server that make it unique from other servers (MAC address, WWN, UUID, BIOS, boot order, etc.).

Unified Fabric that Provides “Lossless” Connectivity

Within the UCS architecture, a single cable is used for all signaling transmissions, regardless of whether it’s data or storage.

Virtualized Adapters

Virtualization is a key enabling technology within the Cisco UCS architecture, and the network adapters within the individual servers are no exception.

Expanded Memory

One of the key performance enhancements in Cisco UCS is the ability to virtualize the physical memory installed in the server DIMM slots. This virtualization allows us to increase the effective capability of the physical memory to four times the original capacity.

Unified Management

The Cisco UCS Manager (UCSM) allows for many blade servers and their related networking and storage con­nectivity, regardless of whether it’s Ethernet or Fiber Channel, to be managed within a single and very intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Cisco Unified Communications Primer

Modern business communication capabilities evolved tremendously from the days of analog and digital telephony. Back then, we relied on Private Branch Exchanges (PBXs) located physically at each site to control the analog and digital signaling for local phones and other devices, such as fax machines and overhead paging solutions.

Related Courses
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS
CAPPSv8.0 – Integrating Cisco Unified Communications Applications

Excerpted from GlobalKnowledge.com

1. Wireless and wired networking will provide access to support the rapid growth of devices and mobility.
2. Virtualization and cloud services will deliver content while providing a lower cost of ownership. This is why Cisco is now migrating most of its own business applications to data center virtualization.
3. The ability to quickly and easily collaborate between customers, staff, vendors, etc., no matter where people are, will transform business processes.
4. Video conferencing, the cornerstone of collaboration, already proves to be particularly powerful for doing business at a distance, both locally and globally.
5. Network security elements will converge, resulting in seamless connections and context-aware security that recognizes who you are, what you’re supposed to have access to, what device you’re on, and where you are globally.
6. A network technology architecture will connect any device across any combination of networks, increase cost efficiency by integrating network security and management, and improve business processes, including energy management.

Recreated with permission from Cisco.com.

Virtualization Simplifies the Way We Do Business

Once again, datacenters can be very interesting and challenging environments. Due to the drastic decrease in server prices over the years, we have gone from large monolithic mainframe servers that process many applica­tions to one that utilizes much cheaper and smaller servers used for individual applications.

This change in datacenter design means that we have drastically increased the number of physical servers from a few large ones to hundreds and even thousands of very small ones. This created a problem known as “server sprawl.” The result of this was many, many servers added to our datacenter that each ran a single application. These servers were extremely underutilized and collectively created excessive amounts of heat. Since this heat had to be dissipated with appropriate cooling measures, this resulted in equally excessive power and cooling costs.

In modern datacenters, we are now able to virtualize these many servers onto a relatively few physical servers. Although it depends on the type and utilization of a particular application, a normal rule of thumb has shown that we can effectively virtualize 10–15 servers per physical host. This represents a significant reduction in a data­center’s footprint and heat generation. For our Unified Communications servers, we are currently able to virtual­ize up to four servers per physical host. However, this capability will certainly increase with each new version.

Lower CAPEX and OPEX

Given that datacenters are incredibly expensive to run (they require expensive real estate, use incredibly large amounts of electrical power, and have high operational costs), virtualization of our datacenters represent a reduction in a company’s Capital Expenditures (CAPEX), but more significantly, their Operational Expenditures (OPEX).

One of the highest operational costs within a datacenter is the servers themselves. Modern single-purpose servers have been shown to only have 5–10% utilization, on average. Conversely, if your servers are using a large per­centage of your datacenter’s power, like 75%, then we have a very inefficient scenario. By virtualizing these serv­ers, we can now combine many servers (10–15) onto a single physical server, which raises the overall utilization significantly and, therefore, lowers the power requirements, relative to running 10 to 15 separate servers. This alone represents a savings of millions of dollars in a year’s time, according to feedback from many companies.

Additional benefits can be seen beyond the reduced power requirements. In a traditional datacenter, many smaller servers generate a LOT of heat, which must be dissipated via cooling efforts. The yearly cooling costs are extremely expensive; but just as bad, strict formulas dictate that we can place only so many servers within so many of square feet in the datacenter. Through virtualization, we are able to place a greater number of serv­ers per square foot of the datacenter with reduced cooling requirements. This equates in a much more efficient datacenter that is more productive and profitable.

Likewise with these other operational costs, cabling represents a HUGE investment in a typical datacenter. For every server that is virtualized, we are able to reduce the physical cabling required to connect that server. Ad­ditionally, when implemented within the Cisco UCS, we are able to take advantage of Unified Fabric and further reduce cabling requirements, since we can send both LAN and Storage signaling over the same cables.

Improved Availability

In a traditional datacenter, if one of your Unified Communications servers crashes, you normally must restart that device manually. This represents a potentially significant outage for that UC device.

When we virtualize our UC servers, we can take advantage of VMware’s great tools like High Availability (HA) and Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

• With HA, the failed virtual server will be automatically restarted, which saves a significant amount of downtime, resulting in greater productivity and profits from that server.
• With SRM, we can provide Disaster Recovery by quickly failing over a virtual machine from a main pro­duction site to a secondary site while ensuring the VM remains active.

Licensing

One of the great benefits that we’ll see when virtualizing our UC servers on the Cisco UCS platform is that we can achieve actual platform mobility. On traditional Cisco Media Convergence Servers (MCS), the UC license is tied to the physical server’s MAC address of the primary network interface card (NIC). This means that the instance of the UC application is always tied to that physical device. But what if that server hardware fails? This means that we are forced to endure some amount of outage until we can build a new server.

With the Cisco UCS, we are able to create Service Profiles that represent the identity of the actual server. We can then “associate” this service profile with any of the blade servers within the UCS 5108 chassis. By doing this, we can simply associate our UC server with a new blade server, if needed.

Of course, you may ask how this is possible when the UC license is tied to the physical NIC of the server. Within Cisco UCS, we are able to build what’s called a “MAC license,” which is based on several configuration compo­nents of the UC server:

1. Time zone
2. NTP server
3. NIC speed
4. Hostname
5. IP Address
6. IP Mask
7. Gateway Address
8. Primary DNS
9. SMTP server
10. Certificate Information (Organization, Unit, Location, State, Country)

Once the MAC license has been configured, it can simply be associated with the Service Profile and applied to whichever physical blade server is needed.

Ease of Installation in UCS Using OVF Templates

One of the barriers to entry, when it comes to UC servers, is the general complexity required to build and config­ure these applications properly. There is a considerable learning curve required, which requires the presence or availability of administrators or engineers with these specific skillsets.

With Cisco UCS, configuration templates are available that allow administrators to build and configure complex UC servers, often with little to no knowledge of datacenter requirements to install UC applications. To make things even easier, these templates are freely downloadable from Cisco.

The templates conform to an industry-recognized virtualization format called the OVF, or Open Virtualization For­mat. The OVF is an open standard for describing a virtual machine template. These templates will actually come with an .ova extension. The Open Virtualization Archive (OVA) is an open standard to package and distribute these templates. For most supported UC applications, a preconfigured OVA file is provided by Cisco and must be used. Otherwise the customer must manually build OVA files that meet the indicated requirements.

Related Courses
DCUCI – Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Implementation
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS

This post is reprinted and used with permission from Virtualizing Your Cisco Unified Communications with Cisco UCS

Likewise, the PBX also defined and controlled the signaling of external trunks to the telephony carrier’s central office (CO).

Today, the implementation of server-based solutions based on the TCP/IP protocol suite has become standard practice. These newer IP-based PBXs fulfill exactly the same role as traditional PBXs by housing the dial plan; identity of endpoints, gateways, trunks, etc.; device features like Call Park, pickup, Music on Hold (MoH), confer­encing, etc.; and other communications configurations.

While the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) is at the heart of Cisco’s UC design, there are many additional components that greatly increase the organization’s capabilities to stay connected.

For example, a few of these additional server-based resources include:

Cisco Unified Presence

This feature-rich UC component uses standards-based protocols such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Jabber Extensible Communications Platform (XCP) to work with a range of native and third-party client ap­plications.

Users are able to initiate such activities as instant messaging, presence, click to call, phone control, voice, video, visual voicemail, and web collaboration. Cisco Unified Presence lays the foundation to deliver enterprise IM and Cisco rich, network-based, presence-enabled collaboration capabilities.

Cisco Unity Connection

Cisco Unity Connection is a Linux-based appliance that provides a robust unified messaging platform for Cisco’s Unified Communications suite of products. This product allows the user to access and manage voice messages in a variety of ways, using his/her email inbox, web browser, Cisco Unified IP Phone, smartphone, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, etc.

Additionally, Unity Connection provides speech recognition features for mobile users, ensuring the user can safely and quickly manage and access voicemail while driving or otherwise preoccupied.

Cisco Unified Contact Center

This powerful set of products comes in two variations:

1. Enterprise — Delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management for large-scale enterprise deployments
2. Express — Designed for midmarket, enterprise branch, or corporate departments requiring a sophisti­cated customer interaction management solution for up to 400 agents

Cisco’s UC products evolved over the years from Windows applications installed on Microsoft Server plat­forms to predominantly appliance-based solutions installed on Linux platforms. The included system, network, and user features have increased steadily with each release, but the most dramatic improvements can be seen in the most recent version of the Cisco UC, currently in version 8.x. As of version 8.0(2), virtualized deployment is fully supported, when installed on the Cisco UCS architecture.

UC on UCS Requirements

Cisco supports virtualizing your Unified Communications solutions on the UCS system, according to these require­ments/considerations:

1. Cisco UC applications supported in a virtual environment include:
   • Unified Communications Manager 8.0(2)
   • Unified Contact Manager Express 8.0(2)
   • Cisco Unified Presence 8.0(1)
   • Cisco Unity 7.0(2)
   • Cisco Unity Connection 8.0(2)
2. The only hypervisor supported initially is VMware vSphere ESXi version 4.x which includes more of the real-time enhancements required for UC than ESX. Any other hypervisor versions, products, or vendors are not supported.
3. Bare-mental/physical/non-virtualized installs are not supported.
4. Dedicated CPU/RAM/Storage is required for the VMs, oversubscription is not yet supported.
5. VMware supported SAN storage is required.
6. 1–4 Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) Virtual Machines per server, dependent on the model, with MCS 7845 parity per VM (7,500 users).
7. Application co-residency is not yet supported — the ultimate goal is “mix and match.”
8. Only “Basic” features supported (e.g., copy VM, restart VM, HA, SRM), “Advanced” features are deferred to future versions (e.g., vMotion, snapshots, DRM, templates, DPM, etc.) .
9. The hardware BIOS, firmware, and drivers are managed by UCS and VMware, not by CUCM.
10. The boot order is controlled by the VMware virtual machine’s BIOS instead of by the CUCM Application.

Related Courses
DCUCI – Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Implementation
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS

This post is reprinted and used with permission from Virtualizing Your Cisco Unified Communications with Cisco UCS

• Computing
• Network
• Storage

Instead of being simply the next generation of blade servers, the Cisco UCS is an innova­tive architecture designed from scratch to be highly scalable, efficient, and powerful with one-third less infrastructure than traditional blade servers. The net effect of this is dramat­ically reduced power and cooling costs and easier, centralized management.

The Cisco UCS is made up of the following major components:

• Cisco 6100-series Fabric Interconnects
• Cisco UCS 5100-series Blade Server Enclosures
• Cisco 2100-series Fabric Extenders
• Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers
• Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-mounted Servers
• Cisco UCS Converged Network Adapters (CNA)
• Cisco UCS Manager

Gone are the days of disparate (siloed) systems all across the datacenter with their many different management tools and networking infrastructure. Here to stay is a unified architecture that offers these key features:

1. Hardware State Abstraction
   With Cisco UCS, we can use “service profiles” that represent the physical characteristics of a server that make it unique from other servers (MAC address, WWN, UUID, BIOS, boot order, etc.). We are then able to attach these service profiles to individual servers. So, as long as the individual blade servers are booting from either a PXE Server or doing a SAN boot, we can achieve a stateless server capability by moving the identity of a server (profile) to any physical blade server when needed.
2. Unified Fabric that provides “Lossless” connectivity
   Within the UCS architecture, a single cable is used for all signaling transmissions, regardless of whether it’s data or storage. Additionally, through the use of Priority-Based Flow Control (PFC), we can replicate the same capability within Ethernet that Fiber Channel already has of ensuring that frames are never dropped.
3. Virtualized adapters
   Virtualization is a key enabling technology within the Cisco UCS architecture, and the network adapters within the individual servers are no exception. While there are multiple adapter models, there are specific PCIe adapters within the C-Series servers and mezzanine adapters within the B-Series blade servers that allow for multiple virtual network adapters (vNICs) to be present over the single physical network adapters. This capability allows for the “stateless” capability that was previously mentioned.
4. Expanded memory
   One of the key performance enhancements in Cisco UCS is the ability to virtualize the physical memory installed in the server DIMM slots. This virtualization allows us to increase the effective capability of the physical memory to four times the original capacity. This is a significant technology, since it allows us to use cheaper memory and still achieve a greater memory footprint.
5. Unified management
   The Cisco UCS Manager (UCSM) allows for many blade servers and their related networking and storage con­nectivity, regardless of whether it’s Ethernet or Fiber Channel, to be managed within a single and very intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI). Additionally, a very powerful Command-Line Interface (CLI) is provided as is an XML Application Programming Interface (API). These management capabilities provide a very powerful and centralized management functionality that is simply not present in other vendor solutions.

Related Courses
DCUCI – Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Implementation
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS

This post is reprinted and used with permission from Virtualizing Your Cisco Unified Communications with Cisco UCS

Now, onto the main topic.  A colleague emailed me this week regarding Call Control Discovery.  I thought it would a good topic to blog about.  For a moment, let’s imagine you’re a multi-national organization.  For any number of technical, organizational, and regulatory reasons you have several Cisco Unified Communications Manager clusters.  You might also have deployed Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express at your smaller sites.  Each of these call control systems acts independently; they know nothing of each other unless you tell them about each other.

For many years, we wished for the voice networking equivalent of the routing protocols our routers so enjoy.  But without such an animal, we were left with very few choices.  One option is to set up a gatekeeper and build a gatekeeper controlled truck from each of the call control systems (CUCM or CUCME) to the gatekeeper.  In addition to bandwidth management, the gatekeeper can handle address resolution.  When a new range of numbers is added at a site, a single update to the gatekeeper causes those numbers to be reachable by any of the call control systems.

Another option is to build a full mesh of H.323 or SIP trunks.  This solution works well if you don’t have to worry about bandwidth management.  But any change in the dial plan might require adjustments to all the call control agents.  This makes the gatekeeper a more desirable option for most deployments.

All of that (like the lack of multitasking with Cisco Mobile) may well be a thing of the past.  If you thumb through the CUCM Features & Services Guide, you find a section about Call Control Discovery.  At the risk of oversimplifying things, CCD is the voice routing protocol that allows call control agents to discover one another, advertise the directory number patterns connected, and block some learned patterns if required.  If you’re using E.164 numbering (see a previous post on this topic), you’ll find there’s not a lot of work required to set up this feature.

The only issue you might encounter is that this service does take advantage of Cisco’s Service Advertisement Framework (“SAF”).  It’s possible your underlying network isn’t enabled or configured for this feature.  Like any other feature, you should always read not only the documentation in the manuals, but also your release notes, and check the Cisco Bug Toolkit for any known interactions between the versions of CUCM / IOS and the CCD/SAF features.

As this blog’s reader, you know T1s, E&M lines, and the like can be connected to a voice gateway.  The gateway will sample, digitize, encode and packetize that audio for transmission across an IP network.  Why would you do this?  It’s actually pretty simple.  Leased line circuits run from point A to point B.  If you wake up one morning and decide to move your dispatch center from B to C, you’ll have to work with the telco to reconfigure the leased line.  Microwave links might take even longer than landlines to reconfigure because of frequency coordination, path analysis, moving dishes around, replacing feedlines, and so on.

But, if you used an IP network, the dispatch consoles could be anywhere on the network as long as they have connectivity to the tower site.  Radio-over-IP, or RoIP, gives the customer new flexibility.  Not only can we move consoles around, but we can even replace them with PC-based applications emulating that functionality.  Perhaps this could all be accessed across a QoS-enabled VPN.  Due to concern over pandemic flu, some agencies are looking at telecommuting dispatchers as one part of operations plan continuity.

There are many vendors in the RoIP space.  Some are old school.  They’re building the same consoles, except with an Ethernet interface instead of a telco interface. Cisco is also present in the space with the IPICS product.  The Cisco solution goes beyond circuit replacement to focus on Unified Communications instead.

Sounds like a great marketing or sales pitch, but what does it mean in practice?  With IPICS I can use a service on my IP phone to access the radio channel.  Any authorized user can use an IP phone to communicate with radio-equipped field personnel.  There’s also the ability to cross-connect the telephony and radio systems to allow radio users to place and receive phone calls.  On the data side, newer digital radios support messaging which IPICS can bridge into SMS, SMTP, and IM.  In other words, while RoIP is about carrying audio across the IP network, Unified Communications is about accessibility.

Courtesy of Cisco Systems

To effectively plan and design a business video network, you must first understand the requirements for the particular type of business video you’ll be using. This brief overview of the five primary categories comes from Cisco’s white paper: Business Video Planning: Consider the User Experience and Operational Efficiency

Many-to-Many, Real-Time Interactive, High-Definition (telepresence and high-definition videoconferencing)
The major challenge here is achieving very stringent network performance targets. Telepresence, for example, is 100 times more sensitive to packet loss than VoIP since it is compressed by nearly 99 percent. Even one dropped packet out of 10,000 is clearly visible on a large screen, detracting from the immersive experience. General requirements include:

• Sufficient bandwidth: The typical requirement is 4–12 Mbps per endpoint.
• Quality of service: Network switches and routers look at each packet’s QoS markings to determine its priority relative to other traffic on the network. Telepresence traffic needs the highest priority, above application traffic, FTP, email, and so on.
• Scheduling: If telepresence traffic for a scheduled session from 1 to 2 p.m. will pass through three routers, the scheduling application needs to instruct all three routers to reserve the appropriate amount of bandwidth for the duration of the session.
• Storage and playback: If you plan to capture and store high-definition video for later playback, the medianet design must consider the bandwidth needed for playback. Playing back the video in another telepresence room requires the same bandwidth as an interactive telepresence session, while playing it back on a desktop requires less bandwidth. Centrally recording and storing video significantly affects storage requirements, depending on the number of videos, stored video resolution, and retention periods.

Many-to-Many, Real-Time Interactive, Low-Definition Video (Cisco WebEx and standard-definition videoconferencing)
While a medianet designed for telepresence has most of the capabilities needed for Cisco WebEx and videoconferencing, there are however, a few additional capabilities:

• Packet inspection: Switches and routers ordinarily regard Cisco WebEx traffic as data traffic. But the packets actually need priority treatment because they include latency-sensitive video.
• Support for unpredictable usage: Since videoconferencing calls are often spontaneous, as opposed to a scheduled telepresence call, the design must account for unpredictable traffic peaks.

Many-to-Few, Noninteractive, Low-Definition Video (IP video surveillance)
If you need to capture video from multiple devices and displays them all on a single console, you must consider:

• Scalability: Typically, each standard-definition IP video surveillance camera requires 3 to 4 Mbps of WAN bandwidth, or 40 Mbps for 10 cameras.
• Reach: Your organization might want to enable personnel in any facility to view video surveillance feeds from any other facility, even in another country. Other organizations might prefer to restrict access to camera feeds to local personnel, for security reasons.
• Manageability: A well-designed plan specifies where to store video, retention policies, and how to search. The plan should also address integration with notification systems, such as who to alert when a camera detects a human in a certain area.

Few-to-Many, Non-Real-Time Video (digital signage)
Many signage deployments are noninteractive, but those with touchscreen displays are interactive and have somewhat different requirements. Design considerations include:

• Workflow: Organizations need processes and technology to capture, store, and distribute streaming video and store-and-forward video. A content strategy is vital to help ensure that signs are not blank for part of the day, and that content conforms to corporate branding guidelines for look and feel.
• Integration with other business video: When your digital signage is not displaying news, announcements, or promotions, you might want to broadcast TV news, third-party advertising, streaming events with limited seating, etc.
• Third-party content: If your organization sells advertising, a digital signage solution that provides a secure interface for advertisers avoids the need for the IT team to spend time on content submission and scheduling. Schools and other public organizations that use digital signage for emergency notification and instructions might want to give public safety agencies a direct interface to broadcast updates.