Avaya’s Collaboration Pod Combines UC, EMC Storage and VMware vCenter
Avaya’s Collaboration Pod Combines UC, EMC Storage and VMware vCenter by UCStrategies Staff
Collaboration Pod, a prepackaged converged infrastructure solution has been released by Avaya. It combines the unified communications of Avaya with networking, EMC storage and VMware’s vCenter platform.
In August 2013, Avaya released a fully virtualized version of its flagship Aura UC platform, and the Collaboration Pod was also first introduced at the same time. Aura customers were able to distribute Aura applications in VMware-based environments rather than requiring dedicated servers. Customers at the time were also able to purchase this new virtualized offering called Aura Virtualized Environment (Aura VE), as a pure software offering, a server-based dedicated hardware version, or as a Collaboration Pod.
Enterprises and cloud service providers that are seeking out a full stack, plug-and-play communications and collaboration solution, will be interested in the Collaboration Pod model. It provides converged networking, storage and virtualization technologies delivered with Avaya Collaboration Pod, and this ensures that cloud service providers can speed up their push to public and private clouds, disregarding the need for a large amount of integration testing or IT investment.
The director of fabric and infrastructure product management at Avaya, Randall Cross, said that IT teams will also be able to pay more attention to critical tasks like helping sales teams of developing customer-facing technologies, instead of focusing solely on infrastructure.
Cross said: “Communications, collaboration and infrastructure -- if your company has more than one person or customer you have to have these things. So really, they're table stakes, and you don’t want your IT team to be focused or [sic] spending a bunch of time on table stake technologies. You want to make those [technologies] as easy to consume and digest as possible, so IT can focus on the right areas.”
The range of Aura UC technologies is also made available through the Avaya Collaboration Pod for Aura VE; this includes Aura Communication Manager, Avaya Session Manager, Application Enablement Services and Aura Presence Services.
EMC’s VNX 5300 unified storage array and VMware's vSphere ESXi 5.0 compute servers are also part of the Avaya Collaboration Pod, as are Avaya's VSP 7000 top-of-rack data center switch and Avaya's G450 Gateway. Optional additions are the Avaya Aura Messaging Server and the Avaya Session Border Controller for Enterprise. Avaya’s Pod Orchestration Suite allows for the management of all components.
According to Cross, Avaya UC-focused channel partners will lengthen their presence in the infrastructure space as a result of the new Avaya Collaboration Pod. Infrastructure-focused partners will develop a leveraged UC play.
Cross added: “We spent a lot of time talking to our partner community and trying to understand the best way to go into this space. If you look at some of our traditional Aura partner base, they haven't been getting into infrastructure. And, similarly, for some of our infrastructure partners that haven't been on the application side, [Collaboration Pod] brings in a new element for them.”
Avaya Collaboration Pods can be sold by Avaya partners selling Aura. Partners who hold VMware- and EMC-specific certifications will be able to access full services and additional help for Collaboration Pod. (CY) Link