30-Phone Pain Management Clinic with 2.4

Been a while since I posted a success story, so here goes.

We completed a Pain Clinic here in Albuquerque, NM today. Here are some specifics:

Server: HP DL-360 with a Quad-Core Xeon and 2-Gigabytes of ECC RAM, Hardware RAID-5 (Serial) and onboard Gigabit Ethernet. Sangona a101 (PCI-Express) attached to a full PRI.

Phones: 30 Polycom IP-430's and 4 Grandstream Handytone-386's for Analog Connections (3 FAXes and 1 Credit Card Machine)

Network: 2x24-Port Cisco 3550 PoE Switches (that are NOT 802.3af compatible)

Highlites: Customer is moving away from Nortel Option 11 and Option 81 switches and trying to de-centralize their telephone infrastructure. This deployment, along with one we did two weeks ago (with same equipment, about 25 phones) is a proof-of-concept for the larger enterprise of about 2000+ phones in umpteen locations.

Things we were able to configure that helped in the migration:

1) 5-Digit enterprise dialing - even though it is on a stand-alone PRI, they wanted to be able to implement 5-Digit dialing, which they already had on the Option 81 - through outbound routes and trunk-dialing rules, we were able to replicate this on the system, so that if person in the clinic calls the hospital, using 5-digits, the sytem correctly formats the 10-digit number and connects via the PRI with no indication to the user.
2) Local VoiceMail with IVR control local at the clinic, instead of centralized at the main location.
3) Training customer Telecommunications personnel to be able to accomplish all Adds, Moves and Changes, thereby reducing TCO of the system.
4) Polycom phones are SIGNIFICANTLY better sounding than the Nortel phones they were using.
5) Unified wiring instead of a Telecommunications network and a Computer network.

Lessons Learned:

1) HP DL-360's are NOT compatible with ACPI using Trixbox - leave acpi=off in the grub.conf, or you will have the system quit receiving and making calls after about 24 hours.
2) Cisco 3550 PoE switches are not 802.3af PoE Compliant - if you have a 430 plugged into them and are using PoE, when it gets to "loading sip.ld" the phone reboots. Had to use the power supplies.

I will post more as this project progresses these next few months.

Greg