Overview

Zoning is a feature of Avaya Experience Portal introduced in release 7.0.

This feature provides an advantage to customers at geographically distributed sites and to customers with a large system in a single location.

Zoning entails three main advantages for Experience Portal (EP) customers:

• Easy management of large systems, such as MPPs

• Effective management of WAN traffic

• Local Access and Transport Area (LATA) considerations for outbound calls

Zone architecture 

Zones are extended Avaya Experience Portal systems. All resource management and configuration are centralized in zones. Each zone is either coresident to create artificial boundaries for resource management, or is deployed remotely so that all RTP traffic is contained within the location represented by the zone. All primary EPM data traffic crosses zonal boundaries, including configuration information, control, status information, and report data. SIP traffic can also cross zonal boundaries though each zone must have a configured proxy.

The zone-specific resources are:

• Auxiliary EPMs

• Media servers

• Speech servers

• VoIP configuration

  Note:

  The proxies are shared across zones, but traffic routing causes certain issues. The shared proxies provide call distribution across zones. For example, on ASM, you can route calls to specific numbers only to MPPs in a particular zone. You can also set it up to distribute these calls across MPPs in different zones as well. If the SIP proxy is set up to distribute calls across zones, but one of the zones does not have an application configured for that particular number, the MPPs in that zone will reject those calls.

• Multi-media configuration

The system stores the resources in the primary EPM configuration database. The primary EPM OMS Poller distributes zone-specific data to each zone. The primary EPM performs the following functions:

• Downloads zone-specific configuration to Media servers, for example:

  • ASR/TTS resources assigned to a zone

  • Proxy configuration assigned to a zone

  • H.323 configuration assigned to a zone

  • Applications assigned to a zone

    	Note:
    	Application servers are not configured and, therefore, are not assigned to a zone. Such Application servers are common resources.

• Polls for status and statistical data from each server.

• Manages the operational states, for example, Starts, Stops, Restarts, Reboots, and Halts.

• Downloads the report data, for example, the Contact Summary and Contact Detail reports.

Zonal Entities 

Zonal entities are resources that you can assign to a zone. You can add the following entities to a zone:

• Auxiliary EPM servers

• Media servers

• SMPP and HTTP connections

• Email connections

• Speech servers (ASR and TTS)

• Applications

• HTML Redirectors

Zone support 

• Zone support in H.323 deployment — Stations are not shared across zones.

  	Note:
  	The system assigns each Communication Manager configuration to a zone. To use Communication Manager across zones, Communication Manager requires individual configuration for each zone.

• Zone support in SIP deployment.

  	Note:
  	The customer can configure the total concurrent SIP sessions that a tenant uses. This configuration includes all the zones belonging to the tenant.