In our work environments, in many cases, our communication departments are siloed from other departments, which increases the possibility of creating problems for ourselves and other teams. During 2019 Avaya ENGAGE, Alex Morales, leader of the New York Metro IAUG Chapter gave a presentation called Designing, Implementing or Upgrading Telecom Solutions, talking about this exact issue. Morales explained that now more than ever, we need to communicate with other teams, one of them being the networking department.
During the session, Morales had five talking points for communications teams when working with their networking peers.
- Connectivity to the Avaya Cloud Platform if applicable.
- Bringing in networking and security teams before connecting to the Avaya Cloud Platform is essential. “If Avaya’s giving you access, and you have an IP and a port, getting their expertise is essential,” says Morales.
- Network Quality of Service
- Asking networking teams defines the bandwidth requirements for various data and knowing what the QoS Policy looks “inside” and on the WAN/MAN Edge will help you avoid getting “bitten” by QoS.
- Understanding the bandwidth of data flows
- “When someone picks up the phone and hears a dial tone, that dial tone isn’t transmitting over the wire. It’s zeros and ones going back and forth. Do you know the path that takes? Have you asked or taken the time to do a traceroute?” asks Morales. Traceroutes are your friend. Learn how to use it and use it well.
- Understand how the network self-heals
- With wide area networks, most companies will do dual-carrier; that way if one goes down, data flows other to other carriers or some other way manage the flow. RGE is one of the more popular protocols and by default takes 45 seconds to re-converge or “heal.” Sit down with your networking team and ask if there’s BGP in your wide area, and if there’s
failure , how it self-heals. “All it takes is one guy on a conference call for a $10 million deal, [and all of the sudden] voice doesn’t work, and now it’s the longest 45 seconds of his life. You can bet you can get a call from him,” says Morales.
- With wide area networks, most companies will do dual-carrier; that way if one goes down, data flows other to other carriers or some other way manage the flow. RGE is one of the more popular protocols and by default takes 45 seconds to re-converge or “heal.” Sit down with your networking team and ask if there’s BGP in your wide area, and if there’s
- Understand your network connectivity model
- Asking the networking team for network configurations and asking the network team to routinely test will give you a better understanding of how the network works and how it will affect your job.
If you want to learn more from Alex Morales’ session and many more from 2019 IAUG ENGAGE, go to the 2019 Avaya ENGAGE Session Content page to talk about these sessions with other community members. Not an IAUG member? Sign up today!
