Mitel 5000 and DR

[venner]

Hi all,

We are hoping to get some impartial advice/tips as telephone systems are not really our area of expertise.

We have been using a single Mitel 5000 in our main office for a couple of years now, and it seems like a decent bit of kit.  Our main office is effectively our data centre and has an ISDN30 for telephony.  We have a second office which currently has an old telephone system that is due for replacement.  We intend to use the second office as a DR site in the event of a disaster at the main office, and it has 2x ISDN2.  We're not yet using SIP, although I am sure we will want to investigate that in the near future.

We could of course run all our phones off the one system in the main office, and use it to provide telephony to the second office.  However, with an eye on disaster recovery, it seems sensible to consider a second Mitel 5000 to be installed at the second office.  We have been told that to do this, we would have the two systems networked together, but they would still be considered separate systems, so for example if we wanted our main office reception to be able to handle calls for the second office, we would need a multi-node attendant console.

I can't help thinking that actually what we want is a single system, but that we want it to be resilient/fault tolerant.  Is it not possible to configure Mitel 5000 machines in this way?  Are they always seen as separate nodes/offices?

Any advice gratefully received.

Thanks

[acejavelin]

The Mitel 5000 cannot do resiliency/fault tolerance... you would need to move to a Mitel 3300, it can do complete resiliency, although the investment would be considerable, even though you wouldn't have to replace your phones (as long as you have Mitel 53xx series IP phones). If the investment isn't an option, running the remote office phones from the main office phones may be a better option.

[venner]

Thanks, that's useful!

[IPInstaller]

3300/MCD would be the way forward but the cost may be prohibitive.

Perhaps another way would be get your line provider to setup a DR plan which could be instigated by a short phone call or through a web portal.

Also, if you went to SIP, you could have failover to another number if SIP registration were to fail. This could send the calls to other numbers, often on an individual basis so it is not all numbers diverted to one number.

The 5000 now supports MBG and it would be worth speaking to your supplier to see if they can get SIP resiliency working on this product.

[venner]

Again thanks, most useful.  I've got lots of googling to do now!

[Tech Electronics]

Veneer,

Have you thought about or considered the 5000 Hosted solution to solve your problem? I find this as a great solution for disaster recovery as your system is separated from your facilities, can be the host for multiple sites, and is usually kept up to date.

Thanks,

TE

[NTEDave]

As TE says you could move your 5000 to a Data centre, as long as your Internet connections are good enough to handle the voice traffic that is.

Your system in the data centre could have ISDN30 with SIP backup to give you some fault tolerance.

The other solution would be to have a 5000 at each site networked together for internal calls, transfers and so on, you would have to have enough licenses on both systems to support the other sites phones and then activate some static routes on your routers so if the 5000 on 192.168.1.254 goes down the phones are routed to 192.168.2.254, the 5000 on the other site.

Or vice versa.

[Tech Electronics]

NTEDave,

That would work fine as long as they didn't mind having a different extension at the second site when they were pointed to that controller. We had done that before and it confused everyone since they had a different extension than before, but everything else was working for them, although they had lost their voicemail messages and when someone leaves they have to update both sites appropriately.

Thanks,

TE

[venner]

Thanks guys, that's a great idea!