The Aura Alliance: Avaya’s Global Solutions Delivery Partner

Combat Networks has long been synonymous with Nortel and Avaya solutions in Canada and when a global coalition of Avaya’s top partners it was only natural that Combat Networks became the Canadian representative for the Aura Alliance.

What is the Aura Alliance?

The Aura Alliance is a group of highly accredited Avaya Business partners working together as a single organization to provide global coverage to support multinational deployments of Avaya communications technologies.

What can the Aura Alliance offer to Multinational Customers?

The Aura Alliance provides global support for your Avaya communications systems requirements, whether an international roll out of Avaya or maintenance of existing Avaya systems within your global organization.
Aura Alliance members have joined together to form an organization with many years of experience, a wealth of knowledge and an incredibly strong skill set in designing, implementing and maintaining single networked, centrally managed, global IP Telephony communications infrastructures.
We specialize in designing, implementing and maintaining global infrastructures based on the Avaya Aura Communication Manager IP Telephony solution and its many applications including:

• Unified Communications

• Presence Management

• Contact & Call Centres

• Remote & Home working solutions

• Conferencing (voice, video and web) facilities

Where does Combat Networks fit in to the Aura Alliance?

The Aura Alliance is made up of Avaya accredited business partners from across the globe who work together as a single provider to ensure that global customers receive a consistently high level of customer service.
All members are accredited Avaya Business Partners; Avaya regulates each business to ensure the business partner community can deliver its products and services to a high standard. Each business partner must hold; Avaya Certifications for sales, network design and engineering staff; product authorisations; service quality certifications and be an accredited partner.

Combat Networks is the designated Aura Alliance Partner in Canada. In addition to providing services to our Canadian based customers, Combat Networks can now quarterback multinational and global deployments for our customers with offices across the globe. Combat Networks will also be the Canadian services arm of the Aura Alliance, providing products and services to multinational organizations with branch offices in Canada.

More information can be found on the Aura Alliance website at www.auraalliance.com or contact Combat Networks at sales@combatnetworks.com

Join Combat & f5 In Toronto

Learn how to virtualize your mission-critical applications

Breakfast is on us (f5) and by attending you could win a Mini Netbook!

Join us for a discussion on How to virtualize your mission-critical applications in your virtual network infrastructure. You’ll learn how to optimize performance, reduce costs, and mitigate the risks of virtualizing mission-critical applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, SAP, and Oracle.

Learn best practices on how to:

• Improve VM host density by 60%
• Integrate F5 and vSphere for complete VM automated provisioning
• Maximize View with a secure access, single sign-on, high performance PCoIP
• Enable long distance VMotion without downtime or user disruption
• Deliver virtualized applications globally across multiple data centers

Agenda Overview

8:30 a.m. Attendee check-in & continental breakfast
8:45 a.m. Virtualization challenges & how F5 can help
9:00 a.m. How to virtualize mission-critical applications
10:00 a.m. Demo of F5 long distance VMotion

Register Now

Advanced registration is required and seating is limited.

Questions?
Contact Jeanette Geary j.geary@f5.com.

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• Facilitate Escalation
• Track to Resolution
• Engage all of Combat’s Technical resources
• Detailed account of all MAC and Service requests

Get to know http://support.combatnetworks.com/portal.  This is a very important site for Combat employees and Clients. It provides a direct portal into Combat support; where you can get the most reliable and timely response to your questions, trouble tickets and MAC requests. Using the portal, or calling the 1-877-9-Combat (1 877 926 6228) number and creating a ticket  ensures that your issue is tracked to resolution. If escalation is required, the CRM  facilitates it. The CRM gives you access to all of the technical resources at Combat Networks. 

It’s no surprise that many of you are comfortable directly contacting a Combat tech via email or phone when something comes up. We’re proud of the know-how, accessibility and customer first attitude that our technical people have. However, opening a ticket with the Service Request CRM notifies every technical resource across Canada. You won’t have to worry that your request is sitting in the voice or e-mail box of someone who is on vacation, deep in the bowels of a building without external access or otherwise unable to respond. Also, with a ticket you can easily track the progress to a resolution. You can look back to see what was done before if you have a recurring issue and the CRM can provide a detailed and organized account of all service and MAC requests you’ve made at Combat. Your issue may turn into a searchable knowledge base article. 

More and more you will see issues, MACs and queries requiring a CRM ticket to start things off. We want to make sure that we don’t miss things and we want to provide a place for everyone to be able to follow up on what’s happening. If you don’t have access to the CRM or are unsure of how to create a ticket, contact your Combat Networks account representative. They can set up a session to walk you through the system. 

Attached is a document outlining the basic steps to creating a CRM ticket.

Avaya has been very clear about its view of how enterprise telecommunications networks will evolve and migrate to over time. We at Combat Networks happen to agree with their vision and the strategy. Especially for Nortel installed base customers evaluating where to go from here. All things considered (heavily weighted on financial reasons), it makes a lot of sense to migrate to an Avaya Aura architecture in order to preserve the investment in Nortel infrastructure while taking advantage of new features and benefits that Unified Communications can deliver to an enterprise.

We are going to see some great deals and incentives from Avaya to make this migration happen with the least amount of disruption, retraining, and cost as possible. BUT…..there will be some costs that need to be addressed. Avaya has had the forethought to come up with a plan and has developed a model (and a services offering if you are so inclined -Avaya’s Self Funded Roadmap) to customers on where they can find operational savings within their existing telecom budgets to finance the migration.

The formula is simple, Avaya Aura and SIP can free up Operational Expenses to more than offset the migration costs for new hardware, software and licensing. There is an extremely limited Return on Investment/Savings Tool on the Avaya website (Avaya Self Funded Road Map) you input some very basic information including the number of employees your organization has, the number of branch locations and the region and whether your organization’s telecom infrastructure would be considered distributed or centralized.

If you are company with 3000 employees, across 12 offices in North America running on a centralized system, the Avaya Aura Savings Calculator produces a possible net savings of $265,000.

The savings are generally grouped under 4 categories:

1. Network Centralization and Shift to SIP – $76,000
2. Long Distance and Carrier Savings – $100,000
3. Least Cost Routing Applications – $17,000
4. Reduced System, Application, and Network Administration Costs – $72,000

We can debate whether the numbers are accurate or not, but Avaya has done a lot of research in the development of the tool that generates the web based results. There are opportunities to tweak some of the underlying cost assumptions to your specific situation, but as a customer you need to talk to a Reseller partner or Avaya directly to get your hands on an excel driven spreadsheet to get a more realistic representation of what might be the operational cost savings.

So once again, the idea is to look for operational cost savings to create an ROI on the costs associated with migrating and upgrading to Avaya Aura and assuming the numbers bare themselves out, it is a great model and there will be cost savings.

In our previous blog post, which ponders whether Telco’s may exit the Premises Equipment Supply, Delivery and Maintenance market, we briefly talked about the impact of Avaya’s Self Funded Roadmap map on the Telco’s. Avaya is proposing that all operational costs (ie. money customers send to the Telco) will be saved by implementing an Avaya Aura architecture. There are two pretty obvious problems with the adoption of this model. The first one is that many of the installed base customers of Avaya/Nortel purchase and maintain their telephony infrastructures with a Telco. The question is, “Will a Telco support (let alone actively promote) a migration plan that cannibalizes lucrative carrier services in exchange for lower margin hardware, software and licensing sales, promotes least cost routing applications/carrier arbitrage and reduced annualized maintenance costs?” The is answer is generally that Telco’s will not recommend any business model that puts their services revenues in descent mode.

We think the Aura Savings Calculator and the Self Funded Roadmap has merit. Avaya will most likely need to promote the program through non-Telco reseller partners to just get the information into the market. And customers may need to consider that the Telco provider may not necessarily be quick to demonstrate and work with a customer to realize the cost savings from moving to Avaya Aura.

Will Telco’s exit the Avaya/Nortel Premises Equipment Supply and Maintenance Business?

They’ve had a great run. Even with Deregulation, the Telco’s still managed to hang on to a large portion of the market that supplied and maintained PBXs to private and public sector customers. Even as margins in this market on the supply of the hardware, software and licenses continually declined, the extremely generous margins afforded by long term maintenance contracts and the control of the equipment that lucrative WAN and PSTN services were attached to, the Telco’s saw a benefit to being a Reseller of the equipment.

Depending on where you get your statistics from, it is estimated that upwards of 60% (the other 40% presumably would have been supplied and maintained by Nortel directly or Nortel’s non-Telco channel partners ) of Nortel’s installed base of telephony ports have been supplied and/or maintained by Telco service providers. Combining Nortel and Avaya’s market share numbers it puts them pretty much on top of other PBX hardware suppliers worldwide so Telco’s won’t walk away from that business on their own or will they? That decision would be highly dependent on a number of factors including Telco management focus, financial, customer preference and the OEM suppliers views of where Telco’s fit into their partner ecosystems.

There are three issues that may tip the scales in favour of the Telco’s exiting or at least defocusing their efforts on the supply and maintenance of Premises Equipment when it comes to Nortel and Avaya equipment.

The first one is a movement towards contracting the Telco business model to focus on Core Business. That’s generally viewed as providing Carrier Infrastructure and Services and other Regulated offerings. Margins for the supply and delivery of customer premises equipment, like all technology, is under constant pressure and certainly doesn’t provide the return on investment required for an organization with the cost base of a Telco. As mentioned above, it makes sense if you get a nice fat maintenance contract that renews year after year, after year, after year, after year, after year…….(you get the idea) – in fact, there are many customers who have had a Telco maintenance contract on their PBXs since they bought their very first PBX (from the Telco). As of July 1st, 2010 the cost of providing those PBX maintenance services has changed dramatically for all partners including Telco’s.

Avaya’s Partner Assurance Support Services (see a previous blog post about Understanding Avaya’s Partner Assurance Support Services if you aren’t familiar with PASS) is a very dramatic change in the cost and margin model for Telco’s providing services. In the short term, it is expected that most customers that have a support contract can expect to see a maintenance pricing formula that looks like this: Last Year’s Maintenance Pricing + PASS = Your New Maintenance Price. Customers will quickly figure out that the entire burden of a PASS contract (ie. an increase in maintenance pricing) has fallen directly on to their already tight budgets. Certainly some customers will take that as a cost of doing business and resign their maintenance contracts with their existing maintenance supplier as they have during the last 25 years and swallow the maintenance price increase with the supplier more than happy to maintain their healthy margins which frankly are necessary to sustain their huge cost bases that have also been developed over the last 25 years. However, most customers will take a much closer look when it comes to maintenance renewal time. At that point in time, customers who see the formula of Last Year’s Maintenance + Increase for PASS = This Year’s Maintenance Price. It’s up to everybody to make their own decision on cost/value but the reality as pointed out by more astute customers see some of the responses we’ve had to our blog posting) is that they have seen an increase in their costs seemingly without an increase in service or support and that sets off alarm bells all over the place that something is not quite right in the world.

This change in policy may very well set off a series of unfavorable chain reactions that may be difficult for a Telco to swallow. The first part of this negative chain reaction is the possibility of a lucrative annuity business like PBX maintenance being subjected to competition if they attempt to pass the PASS burden on to the 60% of the installed base that they currently support. In addition, Avaya won’t be happy with the pass-thru of PASS because they will start to hear from disgruntled customers about the increase in maintenance prices – or even worse, disgruntled customers who won’t complain but will just go to one of their competitors based on the rule of thumb that for every customer who complains 10 more just simply abandon. The market and Avaya will bring immense pressure to the Telco’s to absorb the costs of the PASS contracts themselves – by the way, you can be sure this was Avaya’s intention in the first place to have the costs absorbed and not simply passed along. If the Telco’s have been running their business based on a cost to margin model that has significantly changed will they be able to adjust before shareholders and management start to see an impact to the bottom line?

The third possible issue for Telco’s in the supply, delivery and maintenance of customer premises equipment from Avaya/Nortel is based on the simple fact that in order for Avaya to remain in business, it needs to sell more products and deliver upgrades and added functionality on a fairly regular basis. The difficulty that they face as an OEM is that customers can’t afford to finance the continual upgrades and new product offerings with constrained budgets and fiscal responsibilities even if they wanted to take advantage of some of the new features being delivered unless….there was a way to take money allocated elsewhere. Avaya has a plan for this and it’s called the “Self Funded Roadmap”. This will be the subject of a soon to be released blog posting “Understanding Avaya’s Self Funded Roadmap” but it could have been easily called “Take the Money you are Paying to the Telco and Give it to Avaya to fund equipment purchases Roadmap”.

Oh boy,

You know IPADs are making their way into the corporate environment when (multiple) customers start asking you how to configure the IPAD for VPN connectivity. Not that we support IPAD issues, but we do support and design VPN concentrators, so to help our here are some details.

First things first, if you are user in a corporate environment I doubt you will be able to get this to work just yet. However if you do have access to your VPN concentrator (in this case Avaya/Nortel Contivity) you will be able to get this up and running.

PLEASE NOTE: You will have to enable PPTP, and this may go against your corporate policy – I am not taking any responsibility for this!

CONTIVITY PPTP CONFIGURATION

Creating a PPTP account on the VPN Router is similar to creating an IPSec account. The steps involved are pretty much the same, with fewer options.

Presuming that you have an operational VPN Router, supporting IPSec clients already, there is not much to adding PPTP support. (These shots are from a 1750 running V07_05.400)

• Under Services->Available, ensure that PPTP is enabled on the outside interface

• In your User Group Profile make sure that a method is configured to provide the client an IP address.

• Also in the User Group Profile configure the PPTP settings to match what is supported on the client.

• Then create a user in the above group that has a PPTP username and password.

IPAD VPN CONFIGURATION

Tap Settings > General > Network > VPN > Add VPN Configuration. Then use the VPN settings for your device.

• Server = your computer’s external IP or hostname.

• Account = your account login

• RSA SecurID = OFF

• Password = your account password

• Secret = computer’s secret, chosen during set-up.

• Send all traffic = ON

Turn VPN on or off

If you have created a VPN configuration, you would find the option to turn VPN on or off in the Settings.

First disable Wi-Fi on iPad, then start VPN in the settings. Wait until it finishes connecting and the status bar would has the VPN icon.

Note: iPad will drop VPN whenever changing the networks.

Ok, that should do it! Now Grab any RDP application for the IPAD you like, go home and use your IPAD to control you desktop, sever or any device with RDP capabilities!

Have fun.

Avaya was doing some marketing in the WSJ this week. The advertisement stands out a little (well quite a bit actually) and does an even better job at calling out some of their competition (Cisco).

“70% of businesses pay up to 50% too much for their data networks. You’re in the smarter 30%, right? Right?”

I have shared a few articles on the cost effective Avaya ERS Data Platform in the past (Current Analysis Review here).  Couple the Avaya savings you will get on the 50% reduction in capital outlay with what Avaya provides on their “Green Savings” energy reduction… and you begin to develop a massive savings on your switching architecture.

Tolly Group found that Nortel Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches were among the ‘greenest’ – using 56 percent less power than their closest competitors and 41 percent less power than other tested devices. A test comparison of data center equipment run by Info-Tech Research Group found that Nortel equipment delivers these results at up to half the total cost of ownership of competing solutions.

Great job Avaya! Here is the full featured add that took place in the WSJ. For more information on the stated 0% financing, let me know and I can provide you the details.

Combat’s Current Architecture

Combat Networks is upgrading our Core Infrastructure and deploying Avaya Aura – Session Manager – as our core communication platform.  We have rack mounted the hardware and are beginning our testing before implementation. Here is the original post of the series: Avaya Aura Integration – Part 1

As mentioned in the first part of our series, the intent of the series of articles is to provide you with a holistic view of our implementation and provide factors for our decisions as we integrate Session Manager.  Sometimes we forget that the same challenges we face (Remote office connectivity, SIP, interoperability, costs etc) daily are the same issues that organizations face when upgrading and/or moving to new voice platforms.

Our intent is that the series of articles provide you a forum to comment, question and view our installation nation wide here at Combat.

Part 2 – Existing Architecture

Today @ Combat Networks

Moving forward with the installation process it important to identify our existing infrastructure and give you a sense of where we stand today – features, functions, and services that we currently use and depend upon here at Combat. This information will provide you fundamental understanding of “Today @ Combat”

Combat Office Locations & Configurations

COMBAT OTTAWA

Combat Networks is headquartered in Ottawa. This location provides the base for our corporate HR/Accounting/Administrative/Sales/& Engineering teams. The facility houses our Main Data Centre, Lab and testing facility, as well as our main PBX – Nortel CS1k.

Ottawa Configuration

Currently a mixture of Analog and IP within corporate HQ that provides voice services to the organizational groups.

HARDWARE

• CS1000 (6.0)
• TMDI (PRI)
• CPPM CORES (Co-resident) (call server, SS, NRS)
• Analog message waiting line card
• MGate – interface card for Call Pilot (600r)
• Call pilot 5.0
• i2000 series
• 1100 Series
• 1200 series

APPLICATIONS

• MobX (Mobility X client)
• Teldio
• Remote VPN
• TM4.0 (Telephony Manager) Interface for 6.0

SERVICES

• SIP Service (Calgary & Montreal)
• Full PRI into office

COMBAT CALGARY

Combat Calgary provides support for our Western accounts and offices. A fully functional support, delivery, sales and engineering office. Calgary office is the HQ of the West.

Calgary Configuration

HARDWARE

• Pure IP office, all IP phones
• BCM 50 – release 3.0 (5.0 is current rel. by Avaya)
• I2000 Series
• 1100 Series

APPLICATIONS

• Remote VPN

SERVICES

• Calgary SIP to Ottawa, analog for local

COMBAT MONTREAL

Combat Montreal represents out Quebec division of Combat, with support office in Montreal and Quebec City.  Sales, Support, hardware depot all reside within our Montreal headquarters.  Currently Montreal is serviced by

Montreal Configuration

HARDWARE

• BCM 400 (4.0)
• i2000 series

COMBAT TORONTO

Toronto is our newest office location, and currently houses a wear house, SE, Sales and Support teams.

Toronto Configuration

HARDWARE

• IP Office
• 1600 series phones

Now that we have a general sense of the underlying architecture for National coverage of Combat Networks voice architecture. The next step is to begin laying out the plan for integrating Session Manager.

Stay Tuned.

There have been a number of initial changes that Avaya has implemented immediately following the acquisition of Nortel’s Enterprise Division. Although Nortel had contemplated changes to its maintenance program prior to the acquisition by Avaya, July 1st, 2010 was the official start date of a new maintenance model at Avaya.

If you haven’t heard the term “PASS” during the last 12 months as a user of Nortel/Avaya voice and data hardware you will become familiar with the term going forward. PASS stands for Partner Assurance Support Services. The point of program is fairly straightforward even if there will be some initial confusion about this program. Here’s the background for those that are interested:

Historically Nortel voice and data equipment was maintained when deployed at customer sites by its authorized (and sometimes unauthorized distributors). If there was a fault in the equipment, the authorized (or unauthorized) service provider would attempt to remedy the problem as they were the contract holder for maintenance services. In some (sometimes many or even all) cases that service provider may not have been able to solve the problem without support from Nortel. Assuming it was an authorized service provider partner of Nortel, they technician on site could call Nortel’s support line and discuss the problem and determine the resolution of the problem with Nortel’s help. Even if the maintenance provider was not technically authorized by Nortel, they could call and receive an invoice based on time and materials. In either case, all of the maintenance dollars flowed to the service provider and Nortel provided this service to partners for free or a very nominal charge even though they had to fully staff a Network Operations Centre and field thousands of calls a day from their service providers. This was obviously not a great or sustainable business model for Nortel but very lucrative for the maintenance service provider.

Unfortunately in any situation, that is so lopsided in terms of all the benefits flowing to the service provider and all the costs flowing to Nortel, there needed to be a change to balance the costs and benefits.

In addition, Avaya wants to maintain a high level of post sales customer service for its installed base by authorized and certifying accredited partners to provide maintenance services. In many ways PASS solves this problem by limiting the ability of non-Avaya accredited partners from offering services on Avaya technologies.

As I mentioned above, PASS is fairly straightforward. It is an agreement between an authorized service provider partner and Avaya where the authorized partner has the right to contact Avaya for advanced technical support on behalf of an end user customer and it legally allows the service provider partner to apply patches and upgrades as part of their maintenance requirements (with some fine print ie. the equipment must be within two releases of current version to receive support).

So as a customer, you might ask yourself, what’s all that got to do with me as a customer as it seems to be an agreement between Avaya and its authorized partners? In reality, using the name “Partner Assurance Support Services” is somewhat of a misnomer. It’s really Customer Assurance Support Services and would probably be far less confusing for everybody involved to change the name. Essentially, the benefits of PASS (and associated costs) flow back to the end user customer. The benefits are clear:

1. As of July 1, 2010 your maintenance service provider must have a PASS contract in place on your behalf in order to be able to access advanced technical support from Avaya or legally provide you with access to software patches. Unfortunately without this contract in place, if there is a problem that your service provider cannot solve without the manufacturer’s assistance, which happens more often than most customers are aware, there could be extended periods of downtime.
2. A PASS contract, as part of your maintenance agreement, should make you feel comfortable that you are dealing with an authorized and accredited service provider partner.

Combat Networks Recommendations:

1. Ask your current service provider if they have a PASS contract for your equipment today. If not, you are not covered to the extent that you might think you are.
2. If you usually issue a tender for maintenance services on existing Nortel hardware, make it MANDATORY that PASS is included in the price.
3. If you are purchasing new hardware, it is mandatory that PASS be included to receive support from the manufacturer as PASS is tracked and contracted for by unit and not by customer.
4. Budget for an increase in your yearly maintenance in the 10-15% range.

Running Avaya ERS with VMWare ESX Server

No doubt about it – you ARE virtualizing something within your data centre…Perhaps the majority of your applications are already virtualized or you are just beginning to consolidate your servers now. Either way a hot industry trend for saving money and utilizing resources to the full potential.

Consolidating is great to save money and resources, however ensuring corporate up time is still no doubt a number 1 priority! That’s what you invest in server architecture to support that up-time and resiliency!

But what about your data architecture?

Business Up-time Policy

Both the server hardware and the networking topology must eliminate any single points of failure, provide instant fail-over capability for link or node failures, and ideally maximize the use of deployed

Both the server hardware and the networking topology must eliminate any single points of failure, provide instant fail-over capability for link or node failures, and ideally maximize the use of deployed switches, network interface cards (NICs), and cabling.

switches, network interface cards (NICs), and cabling.  Those using Avaya ERS 8800, 8600, 8300, and ERS 5500 architecture today will be familiar with Avaya (Nortel) Switch Clustering as a solution that delivers unmatched resiliency, simplicity and cost effecting performance.

Couple the Avaya Switch Clustering architecture with Avaya’s VMware best practices for virtual networking and you then provide your business with the “server AND Networking topology eliminating single points of failure” that you and your business depend on.

Avaya provides a document for best practices Resilient Data Center Server Edge Solutions for VMware ESX Server Technical configuration Guide and you can find it located further down in this post. This article provide a quick overview of the document. For further info and specific configuration details and commands, please download the Technical Document

Accomplishing the Resiliency

Afew recommendations from the VMware aspect as well as Avaya’s are provided here to take into consideration when deploy Avaya’s best practice.

VMware Virtual Networking Recommendations Include:

• Separate Service Concole/VMotion/ISCSI from VM Traffic
• Cross-Team On-Board NICs with PCI NICs
• Use Virtual Switch Tagging for VLAN assignment and isolation
• Disable Spanning Tree Protocol

Nortel Recommendation for connecting VMware ESX include:

• Use ERS Switch Clustering (SMLT) to the server NIC level
• Use Horizontal Stacking and Switch Clustering to simplify cabling and provide zero
  service impact maintenance
• Use ESX NIC Teams in IP Hashing Mode to balance traffic across NIC team *and* take
  advantage of multiple switch redundancy

No doubt about it, to provide resilient stacking you gotta be using SMLT functionality. See this GUIDE for more details on configuring SMLTs

A FEW OPTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Single Server Resiliency

This single server solution provides high-density Gig-E edge switching for servers running ESX as well as multi-switch resiliency.

2. Advanced Multi Switch Server Resiliency

Solution provides high-density Gigabit Ethernet edge switching for ESX servers and provides
multi-switch resiliency with Nortel Switch Clustering.

3. Advanced Multi Rack (Horizontal Stack) Switch Server Resiliency

Moving further into denser server environments with multiple server racks. The practice of providing Horizontal Switching Server Resiliency comes into play. This is provided by combining both Stacking and Switch Clustering with SMLTs. Enabling both of these configurations will give you the ability to connect large numbers of servers with dense in-rack Gigabit connections with active/active links and all of the resiliency benefits of clustering.

No complex configuration is provided as this solution is a simple extension of the topology shown in the above section “Singer Server Resiliency”

>Note that each unit that is added to a stack adds 80 Gbps of aggregate bandwidth to the virtual switching fabric providing unmatched throughputfor access to uplinks and inter-stack switching.

Implementing a Horizontal stacking design will use a unique application of the stack cables to connect multiple top of row ERS 5500 switches. This will extend the stack across a number of server racks or cabinets as shown

Horizontal Stacking Provides the following Benefits

As stated by Avaya

• Fault-tolerant or Load sharing NIC teaming into stack
• Low latency between servers (9μs)
• Highly resilient stacking technology with scalable uplinks
• The ability to leverage two or more 10GbE uplinks across the stack
• Flexibility to spread across multiple data cabinets (100s of servers)
• Ideal for Grid Computing / High-Performance Computing Solutions
• Very High Node-to-Node Communications Bandwidth without impacting uplink capacity:
  Ideal for VMotion and iSCSI

For full information, technical details, and how to configure any of the above mentioned scenarios. Please feel free download this document.

Thanks!

/Adam DaCosta

Let me know if this helps, and what you are deploying with your architecture. I just got emailed a question on Avaya configuration guide on supporting Hyper-V. I will update this post shorltly with information on Hyper-V!