Large Enterprise on the West Coast

From SIPfoundry sipXecs IP PBX, The Open Source SIP PBX for Linux - Calivia

# of Lines: 1,750 HW: Three servers on RHEL4 Phones: Polycom GW: Cisco

We decided to transition to VoIP and in particular to a standard SIP based system mostly for strategic reasons. Our business means running large data centers and we have lots of experience with Linux. Integrating voice into our IT infrastructure therefore was an obvious move. In addition to a SIP based system we liked the SOAP based management interface, which allows us to integrate voice into our Intranet.

We started out with release 2.8 of sipX and the build out took us to about 1,500 connected phones (all Polycom). From the beginning we separated call control from the media server. Based on release 2.8 we could not configure real redundancy, but configured a hot standby system. The JBoss based configuration server ran into some problems dealing with that many users.

We recently upgraded to the 3.x release, which so far represents a big improvement. We are now at 1,750 phones with a plan to further grow to about 3,000. We are very light on voicemail as a company and therefore so far could manage with just one media server.

We have not yet deployed the new HA capability coming out in release 3.2, but expect this to solve our current issues with high-availability and real-time failover.