Managing VOIP effectively. Without the right tools, fixing one problem can mean causing another.
<<<... DeDecker doesn't credit Cisco management tools entirely for his success with voice, however. When the company built a new facility in 2003, his IT shop decided to move to VOIP.
He says he constructed the site, "maybe even over-provisioned it a little," to support voice applications running on the data network. He also has virtual LANs for voice and data set up to segregate traffic and ensure that QoS policies can be applied to voice as needed. "With voice, video and data on one wire, you have to worry about latency, delay, bandwidth constraints - and mostly, how other programs are affecting the voice traffic," he says. "If you are going to invest in voice, you must also invest in something that will give you insight into how it performs. You want to have that warm, fuzzy feeling that voice and data are coexisting happily."
Kevin McPhee, manager for network control and converged solutions at Coventry Health Care in Virginia, says he uses Avaya's Converged Network Analyser and VOIP Monitoring Manager because the products include intelligence about the gear he has installed. With eight sites using VOIP and total of 30 planned, McPhee says Avaya tools help him monitor voice alongside his data network to determine how the two impact each other, with voice running on VLANs.
Still, he says he'd like to collect more data from the phones themselves. "We can see the phones on the network, but we can't see into the phones," McPhee says. "I'd like to be able to collect statistics such as frame errors and jitter by logging into the IP phone." Others also believe voice equipment makers could better tweak their management tools. Tim Ryan, network manager at California's City College of San Francisco, says Alcatel's OmniVista management applications help him monitor performance across his VOIP network with nine campuses, 1,800 phones, 500 analogue ports and the vendor's OmniPCX.