Overcoming Connectivity Challenges for Global Unified Communications Innovator
Connecting VoIP, UC, & Data requires Reliable & Secure Communications Solutions even with Unknown Networks & Service Providers.
Avaya® is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience. With world-class contact center and unified communications technologies which are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premises and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications.
Based on the 34th floor of Emirates Towers Dubai, UAE, Avaya EMEA & APAC is the head-end for half of the world with sales, marketing, training, and support. At this location, there is a full demo center for all of their UC, VoIP, and experience systems. While the data center at Emirates Towers works for in-office connections, Avaya® had wide-area connectivity challenges when connecting from remote locations.
Challenges
Transparent Connectivity Regardless of the Network
The main “brains” of all their VoIP & UC systems are on servers at their head-end office in Dubai, UAE. Connecting remote clients to these servers became quite a challenge. When going to a remote location for a presentation, demo, or training the Internet provided wasn’t always pristine. These issues, along with the inability to configure the remote router caused the team to fight the network instead of promoting their product.
Key challenges were:
- Private and Dynamic IP addresses
- IP packet filtering of VoIP/UC or VPN connections by Service Providers
- Non-transparent LAN connectivity
- No ability to re-configure routers or troubleshoot the service providers network
IpTL FastLane™ appliances overcome all these challenges by providing an End-to-End LAN experience to any Avaya® application anywhere. As far as the application is concerned it is sitting right next to the UC server on the same LAN. Of course, all communications are secure and are between the customer’s endpoints.
Connections When It Counts
Connecting The Annual Partner Conference
Every year 400 Avaya® partners come to Dubai, UAE for three days of presentations and live demonstrations. All of Avays® top executives fly-in for the event; everything must work flawlessly!
Hosted at the Atlantis The Palm, Dubai, the conference takes over the ballroom. Complete with vendor displays there are also individual Avaya® solution demonstrations. The whole show connects back to the head-end main office in Emirates Towers.
Ayaya® contracted a leased-line from telecom provider Du to connect the show network to the Avaya main demo data center…but ran into an issue. The service provider for the Atlantis and the service provider at Emirates towers didn’t peer correctly.
Issues in the core network configuration blocked any tunneling and wouldn’t permit connections. Additionally, ordinary commodity Internet would filter/block VoIP & UC traffic. As time was ticking, there was no time to troubleshoot. In short, this meant that any Voice/Video communications wouldn’t work and any of the live demos would fail.
The hotel was able to provide a 100meg Internet connection but it was a private address with NAT. Also, this Internet would also filter any unified communications.
Helping The Show Go On
The entire conference is connected back to a central rack. This includes the multimedia theatre in the ballroom as well as individual demonstration displays.
Just like a typical branch-office data closet, this rack aggregates all the various network services. To aid in managing all of the different networks, the Avaya® engineers extensively used VLANs as well.
One of the most important demonstrations was when the President of Avaya EMEA & APAC, Mr. Nidal Abou-Ltaif, did a live multi-national UC conference on-stage.
Here remote offices in APCA and EMEA all connected for a group conference call with the entire conference and showed the seamless connectivity for the Avaya® applications end-to-end.
How it Works
To get connectivity back to the UC servers at the Avaya® main office Avaya® put in an IpTL FastLane™ Appliance in the rack as the uplink. The hotel commodity Internet was plugged into the IpTL appliance uplink and the local port connected to the VLAN trunk port of the main fabric switch.
The IpTL appliance made a transparent Ethernet Layer-2 secure pipe, or virtual leased-line, back to the headend. At this point headend datacenter LAN is extended to the hotel show floor.
This allowed the Avaya® applications to run without any changes or modifications. The applications and devices even DHCP their address from the Avaya® headquarters network and seamlessly register to the UC servers.
With IpTL armored TLS tunneling with BlackNoise™, not only were all the communications secured with AES-256 encryption but the link was secured from any intermediate service provider filtering. In other words, all the wide-area network challenges disappeared.
Continuing Connectivity
Multisite Remote Access Anywhere any Time
Avaya® uses IpTL appliances to connect remote demonstrations, remote shows, as well as an off-site training center back to its Emirates headquarters.
Because IpTL appliances can use any IP connection, including private and dynamic IP addresses, it will also work behind firewalls without changing the production firewall configuration.
To make a remote connection, just plug in the uplink port and the IpTL appliance will DHCP an address and automatically connect directly to IpTL appliance at the Avaya® ECB datacenter.
This works even if the Internet is behind a NAT or has a dynamic IP. The use of multiple tunnel ports, including 443, enable the IpTL appliance to “find” a connection to establish a link.
Value Created
Helping our Partners
Ease of use and transparent connectivity helps Avaya’s digital experience applications shine by ensuring a LAN-like network connection with no intermediate network changes.
For the remote user, all they have to do is apply power and plug in the Ethernet; everything is automatic. Furthermore, the connection is persistent even across provider network changes.
- Simplified connectivity enables the use of any Internet connection anywhere. Automatically connects to headend without user intervention
- Works with Private IP, behind firewalls & NAT routers, and Dynamic IP services
- Transparent connections without application modification ensure the full Ayava® experience
- Cost savings by using any provider independent Internet. No need for expensive or incomplete carrier leased-lines
- Direct connection, without the use of P2P or Relay, ensures security
- Able to use and trunk VLANs over the Internet
- Works in filtered/block networks or politically constrained Internet services
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