Avaya Brings Virtualization to Unified Communications

The company today announced that it has worked with Citrix to harden Xen hypervisor technology so that it can now support latency-sensitive unified communications applications. The issue for unified communications applications as it relates to virtualization has been that the additional layer of virtual machine software has adversely affected the performance of any type of application that requires video or voice.

But Avaya officials say they now have a version of their unified communications software running on top of Xen virtual machine software that can support up to 2,400 users. Avaya officials say this is critical because while unified communications software has proven that it can boost productivity, the cost of deploying the software in terms of the number of dedicated servers required has hindered adoption during these challenging economic times.

Avaya virtualization efforts are an extension of the company’s Aura session manager software that makes it possible to access Avaya’s unified communications software over a wide area network, versus requiring each local office to have their own implementation. Avaya claims that it can support up to 250 different locations using a single server at a cost of about $60 per user. Installation time, the company adds, takes about one to two hours.