Avaya Intros Collaboration Pods for Aura

Avaya announces its new Collaboration Pods for Aura Virtualized Environments, the first offering within the Avaya Collaboration Pods portfolio. Avaya touts that the Collaboration Pods can hasten cloud deployments for cloud service providers and enterprises. And in order to optimize the operation of the Collaboration Pods, Avaya has also debuted new capabilities that enable management orchestration through a single interface.

According to Avaya, the Collaboration Pod deploys real-time virtualized communication, as well as collaboration applications, in a new way. It speeds up and makes simpler the path to private and public clouds.

With the Collaboration Pod for Aura Virtualized Environments, cloud service providers and enterprises have access to plug-and-play communications and collaboration solution deployed in a matter of hours, not days or months. Avaya claims that the new Collaboration Pod minimizes or does away with lengthy planning cycles, massive cabling, integration testing, and optimization phases.

Every Collaboration Pod is configured with the following: an Aura Virtualized Environment and preloaded software Pod Orchestration Suite, servers compliant with VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0, a unified storage array of EMC’s VNX 5300, Avaya's VSP 7000 with Distributed Top of Rack capability to link multiple Collaboration Pods and/or external server racks, Avaya G450 Gateway that enable digital signal processing or PSTN connectivity, and openings that allow for inclusion of the Avaya Aura Messaging Server and the Avaya Session Border Controller for Enterprise. 

“Avaya Collaboration Pods are already proving their value to enterprises and cloud service providers who are accelerating time to service, reducing data center complexity and improving application availability,” said Marc Randall, senior vice president and general manager at Avaya Networking, in a prepared statement. “Working with EMC and VMware, this turnkey deployment model for Avaya Aura continues Avaya’s strategy to provide high performance communications and collaboration applications that are easy to deploy, use and manage from data center to desktop and mobile devices.”

Avaya Collaboration Pods are now available in Canada, countries in the European Union, and the United States. (KOM) Link. Link.