NorthLink Ferries are the principle ferry service to the outlying Orkneys and Shetland Isles, providing essential links for both commercial freight services and domestic travel. The NorthLink call centre operates 24/7/365 providing essential up-to-date information on sailings, conditions and bookings.
With the Stromness call centre subject to some of the harshest conditions in the UK, it can sometimes be days before engineers reach them to service the phone system. For this reason, reliability and remote serviceability were the key factors in NorthLink's selection of a ProTalk SARK 1000-HA, High Availability system operated with Snom IP phones.
The ProTalk SARK HA system is based on twin servers with identical configurations and connected by a “heart-beat” mechanism. In the event of either hardware or software failure, the HA platform provides full automatic failover to the standby system without needing any external input to either the PBX, IP phones or ISDN line. Comprehensive testing of the platform has shown failover takes just eleven seconds to resynchronize both the IP phones and the ISDN30e circuits.
Ian Godfrey, Director of ProVu Communications, the exclusive UK distributor and systems integrator of SARK added, “To put this into perspective; if you were 'in-call' and the system took a hit, within the time it took to re-dial, the secondary system would be back automatically on-line”. He concluded, “We know of no other, mid-range SIP/TDM platform that can give this level of resilience at such an affordable price point”.
The ProTalk SARK platform is unique in that it does not require additional hardware for example channel banks or expensive shared TDM gateways to handle failover. Everything is catered for 'in-frame', including the TDM (PRI) 'failover' and 'failback', thus keeping hardware costs to an absolute minimum.