Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Note:
The Redundancy column shown in Table 2-4 shows the type of failover supported
by the voicemail solutions. CUE and CUCM Business Edition do not support any failover.
The original Cisco Unity supported Active/Passive, which meant a backup server would sit
idle until the primary server failed. Cisco Unity Connection supports Active/Active, allow-
ing the redundant servers to load balance the mailboxes.
Cisco Unity Connection Key Features
The following are some of the notable features of Cisco Unity Connection:
Proven appliance-based platform:
Cisco Unity Connection is built on top of the
same stable, hardened, appliance-based operating system as CUCM. (These two soft-
ware products even use the same installation DVD.)
■
Up to 20,000 mailboxes per server:
Cisco Unity Connection scales to a massive
size per server. Even though Unity Connection supports a single-server configuration,
most organizations will opt for a high availability pair of servers.
■
Access voicemails from anywhere:
Carrying on the original dream of Cisco
Unity, Cisco Unity Connection allows voicemail retrieval from phone, e-mail, web
browser, mobile devices, and instant-messenger platforms.
■
LDAP directory server integration:
Similar to CUCM, Cisco Unity Connection
can integrate with an existing corporate directory (such as Microsoft Active Direc-
tory) to avoid creating a duplicate user database.
■
Microsoft Exchange support:
Cisco Unity Connection can integrate with an exist-
ing Microsoft Exchange deployment to enable fantastic features, such as different call
treatment based on your Exchange calendar, e-mail text-to-speech (hear your emails
read to you from a phone), manage Exchange calendar (accept, decline, cancel, and so
on) from a phone, and so on.
■
Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) support:
VPIM is a standard allowing voice-
mail servers to integrate together to exchanging voicemails (and other messaging).
■
Active/active high availability:
Cisco Unity Connection uses a Publisher/Sub-
scriber IBM Informix database scheme just like CUCM between a pair of servers. The
pair of servers can support up to 20,000 mailboxes in a redundant fashion. Both
servers can accept client requests (giving it the active/active redundancy). Typically,
the largest Cisco Unity Connection server can support up to 250 voicemail ports (es-
sentially allowing 250 people to check their voicemail at a time). By creating a high-
availability pair, you can now support 500 voicemail ports.
■
Note:
If one of the servers in a Unity Connection high-availability pair fails, all 20,000
mailboxes are still available, but the number of voicemail ports is reduced to the maximum
supported by the single server.
