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Avaya IP for Critical Care Hospital 2

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rickrhodes

IS-IT--Management
Mar 6, 2005
10
US
Does anyone know of any Hospitals using the Avaya IP telephony solution with greater than 5,000 IP phones and if possible greater than 8,000 IP phones?

 
We are at around 5500 phones here Rick and it is not even something that I would consider at this time.

Mike Jones
Louisiana State University Health Sciences center
 
Thanks
I have 17 Fujitsu 9600 systems all networked together with over 9,000 endpoints and we are currently at the tail-end of our RFP process to replace the entire system.
Between corporate office and the proposed vendors (Cisco, Nortel and Avaya) the push is around 80% IPT and 20% TDM.

Just curious (and concerned) if were acting like "Christopher Columbus" with our decision here.
 
All the major players are pushing for VoIP these days. They want to sell you their solutions and of course changing everything to VoIP is the most expensive option so they make more money. They will also upgrade all your cabling to whatever they consider to be the standards for their products. Yes they have cabling people too. (More money..) You may also have to install new networking switches that you have to put in place for their products to work at a high QOS. (More money) And to me the most important thing would be, how well does it work. Every time some here approaches me about it, I think of how many days I come in and can't get my email or network connection because of some sort of network problems. Now also factor in that if you have VoIP up and running you are now on the largest arena in the world to be hacked. So Avaya (or whatever vendor you choose) comes out with a security patch for another potential place that network security could be breached. They recommend that you wait 30 days before you install these because of possible bugs. Here is a 30 day window that someone could attack your system. Networking experts say to upgrade daily to keep up with the newest latest greatest anti-virus protection, backups and security updates. Now you may be loading up software that has to be debugged.

I had an Avaya business partner call me the other day that is constantly sending me fliers on all the new Avaya products. When I answered the phone it sounded like he was on a cell phone in a bad reception area. I asked if he was on his cell and he told me that he was in his office. Then I asked if he was on an IP phone and the best I could tell (from our lousy connection) he was that he was on an IP phone. It didn't exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy thinking about giving that kind of service to our staff, patients or phones in general that have to be used to save life’s as we do every day at hospitals.

I attended a seminar not long ago with speaker, Gary Audin.
I would highly recommend you look into his prospective on VoIP before you choose any vendor or any VoIP solution. I truly hope this doesn’t sound like I am trying to rant, but In my opinion, VoIP is not ready to be deployed in an hospital environment.


Mike Jones
Louisiana State University Health Sciences center
 
I tend to agree with Mike. I don't work at a hospital, but I do maintain many sights throught the county. For me there were major saving with IP trunking, not IP sets. I connect all my sights using this. I have a few IP sets at my desk. They are OK. But they do the same things as the digital set. With respect to the digital set, they always work. I pride myself on 100% uptime for my all of my PBX's. Not sure if I would have that if I were all IP. Althought I think someday we will all be IP (like it or not). For today digital sets just work too well for me to change.

If I were working on this project I would look at Digital sets but connect the systems via IP. I am sure that you already have a vast data network. Then you can back up the IP trunks with ISDN. This makes your design almost bullit proof.
 
Definity Audix R4 MO DRIVE

Hello all, Has anyone out there tried replacing the OEM MO Drive in the Definity Audix R4, that dreaded Olympus thing with another vendors drive. I'm thinking of trying a Fujitsu MCM3130SS. Has anyone had any success with a different drive and if so would you happen to know what SCSI ID to use.

Thanks in advance
 
How often does your network go down now?

That is how often your phone system will go down.

While I belive 100% in the avaya system, they still have a few warts.

Mikeydidit hit most of the highlights of the issues, but also consider you loose control over a substantion portion of the voice network once you start using the data network for transport. (which is what makes it so flaky).

I dare you to as the data network guys to change xyz, because you will need it on the "new system". Watch how much the piss and moan.

I would go with the ip connected gateways and TDM sets. (thats what we have now)

RTMCKEE


CM 2.1.1
Prologix R9.05
Modular Messaging 1.1
 
one other thing to add. I'd assume that you would want to have these phones work when the power goes out?

I would also assume that you would not want to put individual UPSs at each phone, therefor you would use powered Cisco switches?

A Cisco 4506 loaded with "powered blades" requires a 5KVA UPS (a big monster). If i remember correctly that 4506 will handle something on the order of 260 phones. That's is something like 20 5K UPSs to handle the power of the 4056s. Assuming you could get away with one "Big" UPS id say your still looking at a 60 to 70K ups for all those switches. A 4506 with powered blades uses considerably more power than a standard 4506 with regular enet blades.

Contrast the 60 to 100K UPS requirements with a comperably equiped TDM gateway\Cabinet I think you will find that the UPS requirements are considerably less.

RTMCKEE

CM 2.1.1
Prologix R9.05
Modular Messaging 1.1
 
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