3Com offers a safe bridge to UC for SMB market

In our continuing series of Clear Choice Tests of unified communications platforms, we found 3Com's VCX IP Connect 100 and 200 telephony products hit their target: providing small to medium business with seamless voice and data messaging services (compare products).

A major strength of the VCX Connect system is survivability, because it supports full redundancy with dual gateways. We observed transparent failover not only for phones but also for media gateways and other messaging applications without the system dropping a single call in progress. The other strong points of this UC platform are its centralized management scheme, its strong conferencing capability and its Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) interoperability.

The configuration we tested included components that would reside in a main office, a secondary regional office, a branch office and a home office.

The VCX Connect 100 is a purpose-built IP/PBX appliance while VCX Connect 200 IP-PBX is pre-installed on a Linux-based IBM x3250 server.

Each VCX100 Gateway can support up to 100 softphone, desk phone or analog devices and the gateways can be strung together for larger deployments. The VCX200 has a greater capacity with each supporting up to 250 devices.

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Both platforms support SIP multimedia communications as an interoperable standard which is good for third-party endpoint connectivity and for connecting through SIP-based trunk and hosting services.

The appliances can be configured with optional redundant RAID hard disk drives that feature write-both, read-either functionality. A redundant power supply is available for the VCX Connect 100. Full system resiliency is provided by configuring two VCX 100 appliances or two VCX 200 servers with one of each in primary or secondary mode. During testing, we learned that the secondary server used only a small amount of bandwidth as it maintained synchronization through replication and mirroring.

This solution is modular, which allows for office expansion simply by adding extra VCX Connect servers to the network. The VCX Connect system also permits adding extra VCX gateways for load sharing or to handle call overflow. The gateways can be dedicated for either inbound or outbound messaging.

Our functional scalability tests determined that the VCX Connect 100 and 200 systems allows up to six servers or regions to be connected with no degradation in service.

The initial installation of IP telephony to remote offices is simplified through the use of multiple configuration templates. To ensure a uniform look and feel throughout a company, system administrators can use 3Com's Global Directory and Global Voicemail functions.

The VCX Connect platforms handle unified voice mail and e-mail messaging services. Additional UC functionality can be incorporated by adding an additional server with 3Com Convergence Applications Suite modules that provide conferencing, presence and telecommuting capabilities.