Overseer of Electrical Grid Phase II

This customer oversees the electrical grid for a large region of the southern United States. This challenge entails monitoring the status of the grid in real time, adjusting the electrical supply from hundreds of providers to satisfy demand and to route power around points of failure, all while observing demanding federal regulations for maintaining and providing accuracy, reliability, and oversight.

Forum provides and supports the real-time voice infrastructure used to facilitate instant communication between the customer and their hundreds of provider organizations such as electric power generating companies. This demanding, large-scale, mission-critical voice conferencing application has been well served for over 14 years by Forum's Consortium technology, and maintained by Forum's world-class support staff.

Initially deployed over circuit-switched voice T1s, Forum designed and successfully implemented a Phase II which included a migration to secure SIP / VoIP connectivity for the hundreds of existing provider organizations. Today, this migration is complete, and will continue to connect new provider organizations over time.

Challenges

  • After running successfully for over 10 years, the discontinuation of expensive T1 circuits by telecom providers necessitated a migration to Voice over IP technology.
  • The customer requested options to consolidate Forum's platforms into virtual servers, as part of a larger directive to consolidate infrastructure.

Solution

  • Forum's VoIP experts designed a migration path from their antiquated dedicated T1 connectivity, to secure SIP connectivity using cost effective MPLS circuits to provider organizations.
  • Over the course of a year, Forum worked with the customer to migrate the hundreds of existing providers from circuit switch connectivity to SIP with new provider organizations continually being added.
  • Forum has successfully migrated the customer's production servers to VMware ESXi instances, hosted in the customer's VMware infrastructure.

Key Benefits

  • The migration to SIP has dramatically increased the security and reliability of the customer's network while removing the expensive cost for circuit switched connectivity.
  • Options for deploying wideband CODECs have enabled higher voice quality.
  • SIP connectivity offers more options for voice termination at the provider sites.
  • Goals for consolidation of voice infrastructure have been actualized by deploying the new servers as virtual instances on the customer's VMware infrastructure. Easier to operate and maintain!

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