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Server Based PBX vs. Standard PBX ?
Q. Our company is looking into the possibility of purchasing a server based PBX for our small call center. Without getting brand specific, is there any reason not to go with a server based PBX? There seem to be many reasons for going with one, I would like to know the reasons not to.
A. I'll give you at least one reason: Microsoft Windows. The second is the magic phrase "three nines". I do not want to go into Microsoft bashing. I happen to like most of their software. The problem is reliability. Reject any server that runs Microsoft because there is no way they can guarantee you "telco class" reliability, that is "three nines" or 99.9% uptime. That's a maximum downtime of 3 1/2 hours a year. No matter what I might dislike about Verizon, they claim their reliability is 99.97% and I would seriously agree with that figure, that over the years they have averaged less than 1 hour of downtime per year. Even when we had no electricity because of last week's hurricane, we still had dial tone and never lost it once. If someone wants to offer you a solution using Microsoft software and is willing to guarantee *with contractual cash rebates for failure* a reliability of 99.9% then I would accept it. You'll never get such a commitment, no serious business could ever do such a thing, so it's not worth worrying about. Microsoft Windows is fine for running desktop computers and does an excellent job. But it's not reliable enough for anything requiring critical uptime. Some of their EULAs indicate their software is not to be used for critical applications. The original poster said he was looking to run a small call center. Why does he need all those 9's? Why does his phone server need to be have constraints beyond that of his data server? How useful are his phones going to be when his servers and/or network is down? Also, with respect to Microsoft (which usually doesn't get much respect from me!), systems built on Windows NT 4.0 SP6 with only necessary services enabled can run for months, maybe years, without problems. We have customers who have NEVER rebooted our NT-based fax modem servers. These run a complex multi-threaded networked application which sends and receives 24-48 faxes at the same time. It is probably more demanding than a soft PBX because voice (actually fax) data moves through it. What makes Windows unstable are its junky services, applications, and drivers. If you ran software like that on a Unix server, it would also become unstable very quickly. That's the thing with NT 4.0 server -- it was good for doing one thing per server but not several. Otherwise you're just asking for trouble. For example, our mail server was Exchange 5.5 with very limited space and also handled certain web services. Bzzzzt -- used to have to be rebooted at least once a month otherwise it would flake out. Done the same thing with a Linux box running Sendmail and Apache and no problems, never rebooted it. It was only when the ps fan became so clogged with dust a few years later that we had problems.
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