When CallPilot is down - what is your plan?

[chickasita1]

We are in the process of migrating from MerMail to CallPilot 1005R. The server has already gone down (prior to migrating) and it took 3 days for the vendor to figure out the problem. Needless to say, that did not go over well here. Would appreciate any feedback/advice on support protocols, backups, experiences with reliability, etc. Thanks!

 

[pronei]

In my Experience, CP is very stable. 3 days to solve a down CP is not good at all.

It seems your vendor may not have the knowledge or the resources available to efficiently support your CP. 1 to 1.5 full business day(s) is about the max acceptable downtime for complete failure of a CP unit. In my opinion a vendor should stock at least 1 backup unit of each type of hardware sold or at least have overnite replacement availability.

I do 2 full backups weekly, 1 to tape and 1 to network.

 

[curtismo]

I had two day Call Pilot outage when upgrading from 1.07 to 2.0 about four years ago. The technician doing the upgrade was not experienced with the upgrade (the one person who did go to class was back in KC 'cause he didn't want to drive the 2 hours out to the site.

Backup. Multiple times. Do a backup yourself - and store that tape away before the tech gets there. The vendor managed to do an incomplete backup prior to mine originally and for some reason my other backups could not be used (it was an in-place upgrade of a 200i system).

Have a plan for letting people know they'll have to grab phones. Also plan for redirecting Auto Attendants.

I just did a migration upgrade (2.02 to 5.0) on a new platform. Even with this we had issues with. Get ETAS involved right away. First issue was that we couldn't map a drive from the new server to the PC where we had the disk backup (faster to migrade than via tape) - problem was that a PEP broke it. Then found that the migration wizard would not complete with all latest PEPs installed. Had to re-image the new server, perform the migration, then install PEPs (per ETAS). Complained about the issue to the NT person responsible for CP at INNUA; never heard anything back from them, so did the second system that we upgraded the same way (upgrade, then PEPs) as we did the first and had no issues.

At least with a hardware migration we could reinsert the old platform in the switch and go back, if we had to "punt.

 

[Johnthephoneguy]

I have never had a CP go down for that long of a time. Even when losing the raid controller card, we had a replacement drop shipped to us the next day and back up and running 30 minutes after getting it in our hands on site.

It was down less than 24 hours.

JohnThePhoneGuy

"If I can't fix it, it's not broke!

 

[chickasita1]

Thanks to all for the information. It is so helpful to hear from actual users instead of vendors and NTP's!

 

[curtismo]

Also, go online to Nortel's website and read the release notes yourself. Also, do a search on Nortel's online knowledgebase using keywords such as upgrade, 1005R, etc. Be informed; know what you may be getting into prior to the techician showing up.

 

[nrsman]

The Call Pilot is only as good as the backup routines that you implement at your website.
-If you make multiple changes weekly then backup weekly.
-Have more than one tape backup. From experience a tech will groan if he pulls a faded out tape with a 5 year old date on it. Have multiple tapes available. Secondly for those of you who think that tapes are from yesteryear they are, but they have saved my but many times. If you want to speed up the down time to reload a failed call pilot hard drive have a network backup available. It cuts the reload time in half.
Make sure that you PEP current. Including microsoft updates and hotfixes.
Vendors should be able to get your system back up fairly quickly but only if you keep backups current.




****

 

[johnpoole]

In my Experience, CP is very stable. 3 days to solve a down CP is not good at all.

1st step... get a new vendor.. we upgraded from mm to cp 5 years ago... cp has dropped twice and longest down time was 8 minutes...

build your menu's so that if the cp is down, the calls route to a live person... if your using cp to front end all your traffic... and you want that traffic, make sure a live person is the default for cp going down...

i use a script that sends 30 menus to my consoles if the cp is down... if i loose a building that has a menu front end... i can run a script that changes the ncfw of that acd dn to a live body... i work on site at a hosp.. so we spend half our life planning for events that never occur...

in case of a 911 style event.. all traffic to mail stops.. all room phones cannot dial out or "did:" in... only ncos 9 can call out... that would give us 600 inbound trunks...


john poole
bellsouth business
columbia,sc

 

[Cory356]

Johnpoole,

Was the script you wrote very advanced? I have only had about a years worth of experience with Nortel, and the company I am working for has had me build auto attendants for all of our branches. We have a centralized Call Pilot at our corporate branch where I am located, and if it goes down basically all incoming phone traffic for the entire company is down. Is there any documentation that I can look at as to how you built the acdn's to NCFW to a different number if cp is down?

 

[Utreg]

If routing goes via Symposium / Contact Center try my scripting;
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