rtswin

Take a look at the HP 4000 series, this was known as Lefthand before being eaten up by HP. We looked at the Dell Equalogic, HP and EMC offerings. Both the Dell Equalogic and EMC offerings are of a more traditional variety, in that they require you to have a similar second SAN and mirroring setup, this obviously doubles your costs. HP use something which you could think of as RAID 10 where you purchase two boxes as part of the package and each are put into different locations, everything is actively mirrored. I think I've probably done an injustice to the technical merits of the HP solution, just hopefully given you a brief indication of the differences between solutions. It's worth speaking to all vendors to get all the low down on the technical merits of each solution. The HP solution is DR ready out of the box, so that would tick one of your criteria. Having said that there's a lot to like about the Equalogic range.

If you are talking to SMT, and this is dependent on how tech savvy your SMT is, they are going to look at the bottom line costs only. They won't care about anything technical, they don't know about your job, won't understand the technical jargon. Won't care that it's complicated for you, they aren't doing it, and your employed to do it. Think carefully about TCO, and get costs if SW takes care of the hassles by reducing your time on it's monitoring/maintenance, factor that in heavily when you present the figures. The other things you can do: If there TCO benefits in terms of cost, throw in an additional project you'll be able to achieve, either in total, or sooner than planned, because you're not spending as much time on the current system. Explain the benefits from a student experience perspective of the new software, emphasising real world benefits. It doesn't matter if they are the same in most part as the current system, however, beneficial differences should go top of he list. If you're asked if they are in the current product, emphasis only those that are additional. If there are any additional features that you feel are important in safeguarding that the new product has, and the old one doesn't, place major emphasis on those features. Again refer this back to student protection in large and glowing terms. A three times increase in costs is a tough one though, good luck.

Look into the options for Call Manager extension mobility, this will allow your users to login to the phone, rather than moving the phone. Although if your users are used to the older analog phones it takes them a while to understand that the number is associated with the user, and not always to the device. You can of course setup the phones so that there are no logins, and the numbers permanent to the phone.