Interoperable Communication Strategies for the Federal Government

Unified Communications helps you stay fully connected - wherever, whenever - providing voice, e-mail, instant messaging, fax, presence, white boarding, video and video conferencing. This can be accomplished with one huge bundle, but:

• What if you want to leverage the existing communications platforms you have without undergoing a forklift approach?
• What if you need to integrate existing security platforms?
• What if you need a truly scalable and flexible solution which is not tied to a single vendor?
• What if you need true Interoperability?

Interoperability allows you to leverage your existing communications tools in a secure open platform to link agencies, departments, offices and remote staff with powerful, cohesive, and cost effective communications which is truly scalable and flexible without being tied to a single vendor.

Nsync Services, Inc. provides the latest innovations in Interoperability, IP Telephony and Integrated Collaboration to reduce costs, boost productivity and increase your competitive advantage to drive success. Discover how to best prepare for the challenges ahead.

Enterprise Interoperability

Implementation of an enterprise telecommunications system can be a daunting undertaking. Traditional PBX and key systems have tied customers to their solutions. When you have multiple proprietary systems and need to move to an enterprise solution, this requires a major voice network overhaul. The ultimate goal is interoperable communications. Over the years the industry has created protocols that provide highly reliable, scalable and interoperable solutions such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Many large PBX are using some of these protocols on a limited basis, and others have created their own (H323). They are still left with the same problem of interconnecting disparate systems into a fully interoperable solution.

The 3Com VCX platform can integrate with the existing PBX’s, provide remote site phone systems using VoIP and/or POTs lines, integrate with video teleconferencing systems, and integrate with wireless communications services. Being SIP based and non-proprietary, integration with your existing systems can occur over time, and you will not be tied to a single vendor for station types, video devices and other end user devices.

3Com VCX Overview

The 3Com VCX is a reliable, scalable, and forward-thinking solution for a centralized communications system for the main office location, branch offices, remote sites, and remote workers. 3Com’s IP Telephony solution provides a standards-based pure IP converged application solution for enterprises with one or more locations requiring a highly resilient communications system, while truly lowering operational costs through a centralized management and provisioning system. The 3Com IP Telephony architecture provides flexibility with built-in redundancy that allows you to deploy an IP Telephony solution that is highly available and scalable.

Architecture

The 3Com IP Telephony architecture consists of an access tier and an application tier that communicate via SIP signaling. These tiers are encapsulated by administration and management functions providing connectivity, call processing, and applications that can be configured to meet your needs. 3Com has a complete set of media gateways for reliable and scalable connections to the PSTN, analog devices, and other PBXs.

The 3Com architecture transforms IP Telephony into an enterprise application by converging voice and data applications on a secure network with a common infrastructure for authentication, call control, presence, privacy, and management. This allows you to deliver centralized voice and data applications to your users regardless of their location in the network. By supporting end-to-end Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling throughout the architecture, the 3Com IP Telephony solution provides scalability in both number of users and types of applications, including messaging, audio conferencing, video conferencing, data collaboration, instant messaging, and more. The system is interoperable with any gateway, PBX, VTC, telephone or device that supports SIP.

Local Survivability

The VCX is architected in a fully redundant fashion to preclude “total system failure.” Call control and messaging servers will failover gracefully to backup servers. When the primary server is restored to service, which can be done automatically based on the nature of the failure, control will pass gracefully back to the primary server. In the case of IP Messaging, after automatic recovery of a failed server, the Intelligent Mirroring feature automatically re-synchronizes the two IP Messaging servers. The time required to restore a properly configured server to operation is will range between 2-5 minutes based on user population.

In the event of a WAN failure, a branch office VCX call processor provides full feature transparency and is equipped to enable local and long distance PSTN calls. In the event of a failure of the local VCX call processor, local IP phones and gateways automatically register with its secondary call processor located at the regional office. In the event of a failure of a regional VCX call processor, the local VCX call processor continues to operate normally. In the event when neither the primary or secondary VCX call processor is available, the VCX solution supports PSTN survivability for inbound calls to an IP phone and outbound calls to PSTN from any IP phone configured via DHCP.

The VCX supports call control redundancy (in a non-load-balancing manner) including database replication of two or more nodes. On the messaging side, the VCX supports redundancy in a feature called Intelligent Mirroring (supports load balancing), which provides synchronization of messaging configuration and mailbox data to a hot standby messaging server.

The 3Com VCX ensures high availability using a primary/secondary redundancy architecture that replicates data in real time, uses little bandwidth to accomplish this, and provides transparent failover for users, VCX applications, media gateways, and phones. The Call Server and Authentication & Routing Server are replicated independently of each other, maximizing resiliency of the VCX software architecture.

Redundancy

The VCX IP Telephony solution supports redundancy at the server, power, network, application, and media gateway levels. The solution supports virtual I/O, dedicated I/O, or a combination of both. Redundancy of the servers is highly recommended, where the servers can be co-located or geographically separated (recommended), and each server is running IP Telephony and IP Messaging on a logical partition. The specific server configuration for your enterprise will depend on your unique requirements.

The endpoints (IP phones and media gateways) register with a primary and secondary call processor. If an endpoint’s primary call processor is unavailable, it will simply re-issue the SIP INVITE to a secondary call processor to complete a call setup or teardown. Once calls are established, the media stream occurs directly between the endpoints (IP phone to IP phone or IP phone to media gateway). The call processor is not in the audio path, so a call processor failure does not affect established calls. In the event that neither a primary nor a secondary call processor is available, 3Com’s IP phones will establish a survivable route to a local media gateway for PSTN access.

Network Failover Resiliency

The 3Com VCX Enterprise solution provides the ability to deploy a distributed network of branch offices with call processing that are redundant to a regional office. Branch offices are configured with their own routing, authentication, and user information in addition with the necessary authentication and routing information to communicate with the regional office. Since VCX includes a low-bandwidth replication solution, the redundancy does not adversely impact WAN utilization. A VCX Enterprise “multi site” (also known as Region and Branch) system consists of one or more regional offices, with each regional office optionally consisting of one or more branch offices. The regional office is itself redundant, either locally within one rack, or geographically separated in another room, building, or location over the WAN. The call processors at the branch offices are made redundant to the regional office (primary server) by using the same replication scheme used by the regional (or single site) redundancy scheme. All branch offices use the regional office primary VCX call/data server as their secondary server. In this manner, all branch office databases are replicated at the regional office primary VCX server.

Regional offices are also configured with their own routing, authentication, and user information along with the necessary authentication and routing information to communicate with all other regional and branch offices.

The 3Com VCX solution allows you to administer and provision all sites from a web browser based centralized management console. Corporate administrators can access all sites from the regional office and branch administrators can be given access to their own local branch. In either case, moves/adds/changes are replicated across the WAN to the assigned redundant server.

System Security

The VCX system has the following security features that make the communications system extremely rugged. 3Com’s uniform architecture also ensures that all core IP telephony applications and converged applications have the same level of security and administrative needs.

1. System Security: All VCX servers run on a rugged version of Linux that has inbuilt firewalls enabled to prevent any traffic other than the most required ports open to ensure against most kinds of attacks. The system is architected such that security patch management is simple and recovery is always enabled from failed OS upgrades. System access is allowed only through secure mechanisms such as SSH and SFTP.
2. Authentication: All users accessing the system for telephony, messaging or conferences are authenticated either on a login level or on a per call basis. The passwords are always encrypted using hashing mechanisms and if stored in phones are also secured using hashed keys.
3. Remote users are secured using SIP aware NAT/ALGs which dynamically enable and disable ports in the firewall.
4. Topology Hiding of all core components is accomplished using NAT applications that can be embedded in the B2B user agent architecture of the VCX Call Processing module.

VCX Datasheet