Article Summary:

As companies worldwide migrate to Cisco IP telephony, they are realizing the business benefits of converged networks, including increased productivity, business flexibility, and reduced operational costs. In a Cisco IP telephony environment, a single network infrastructure handles data, voice, and video traffic to deliver high-quality IP voice and fully integrated communications. For Cisco and other enterprises that deploy IP telephony, a major concern is ensuring high-quality service and high reliability of the combined voice and data network. Based on Cisco’s own experience and success with a converged network that is highly scalable, easily managed, and cost effective, enterprises can learn how they can achieve similarly high levels of reliability. This detailed best practices describes how Cisco IT planned and designed a highly available, high-quality voice service on its IP platform, including:

• Network design and management policies for maintaining high service availability
• Quality of service to support voice over IP
• Change management and security
• Migration of two separate networks to one converged network