atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Inter-Tel Telephones & Systems VPU upgrade options?

My voice mail system is aging and this is making me a bit nervous. My original vendor doesn't seem to give me a straight answer and I'm afraid of losing my data and being taken to the cleaners when it crashes.
Can someone tell me what some of my options might be? Could I keep all my Intertel equip and just replace the VM portion? I have a PC running Session Mgr/DB studio which has some HD bad sectors and the VPU is W2K.
Sorry if equip list is long (just primary stuff), but everyone usually wants to know it.

Main OFFICE
550.9104 - CPC 256 w/8 Port Voice Processing Unit includes:
CPU 256(840.0010), Axxess v9.0 Call Processing License(840.0220), Adv CO Interface(840.0038), System fwd(840.0049), Auto Route Selection(840.0042), Directories(840.0046), Uniform Call Dist(840.0052), Multilingual(840.0053), Record-a-Call(840.0047), 8 Port Package - Rackmount Voice Processing Unit with Unified Messaging (550.5319).

550.5122 2-port fax
550.0110 Axxess Power Supply (9 amp)
System OAI Events & 3rd party call control
550.2740 T1/PRI
827.8877 PRI security PAL
550.2300 & 550.2301 LSC 4-circuit Loop Trunk & Daughter
550.2255 DKSC 16+ - (3 count)
550.2116 SLC-16
550.0114 Single Power Supply
550.2265 IPRC

2 SECONDARY OFFICES have these
550.9065 - Axxess 64 includes:
Chassis(550.1300), 4-Amp Power Supply(550.0121), CPU 64(840.0008), Axxess v9.0 Call Processing License(840.0220), Adv CO Interface(840.0038), System fwd(840.0049), Auto Route Selection(840.0042), Directories(840.0046), Uniform Call Dist(840.0052), Multilingual(840.0053), Record-a-Call(840.0047),Adv CO interfaces(840.0022)

550.2030 CPC, 550.2300 LSC, 550.2255 DKSC 16+ (1 count), 550.2500 SLA

You could check to see if Enterprise Messenger could be a replacement. We did this when upgrading from Axxess to the 5000 series. I have to warn you, EM can be a bit flaky. Certain Windows Updates will crash the entire machine and we've had some difficulty with it delivering larger voicemails to email.

Bottom line is disaster recovery plan. I feel my vendor is just waiting for the system to crash to sell me something for big $$$. In the mean time I'm paying $$ for monthly maint plan from them also. So I read prev posts on EVMC cards etc and there are just as many possible problems with HD, fans, PAL.
So, I've opened the VPU and recorded all the Brooktrout cards #s, motherboard data etc. Other than the cards, there dioesn't look to be anything special except needing ISA slots. Has anyone imaged, installed a mirrored HD, or run bkup software to an external HD on a VPU box?

My solution was to buy another VPU off eBay for cheap and keep it as a cold spare next to the working one.

Don't treat the VPU as a PC that you can replace the motherboard on. If you notice, it has a lot of ISA slots, and finding something comparable isn't going to be feasible, especially if you need all those cards/slots!

I have had the HD go out on the VPU before. The restore from factory disks isn't too bad for installing the software. It was much worse when I did build a VPU up from scratch hardware to get the interrupts all right, and troubleshoot BIOS settings issues. (I would highly not recommend this, especially if you don't remember the hardware of the day, dealing with ISA slot interrupts, etc).

Finding those brook trout cards outside of VPU usage will be a pain now-a-days as well. Back in the day you could, but they cost a pretty penny back then.

The nature of the hardware used and the OS requirements make redundancy like RAID and/or external hardware extremely iffy on this box.

As I started out with, I have another VPU waiting in the wings. I have the audio backed up off the system regularly. Swapping in a new old VPU is my recovery plan.

Having a VPU from ebay is a pretty good solution as long as the unit is sound. That being said you look to be a candidate for a 5000 upgrade. The 5000 supports your digital phones and can support the amount of single-line devices as well. The Axxess is aging and soon (relatively speaking) will not be supported by Mitel. It looks like you may be doing some e-faxing via the voicemail server and the 5000 does not support fax-to-email integration. A FaxFinder box is a good solution to replace the faxing component.

You would gain a ton of new features such as hot desking, cell phone twinning, meet-me conference bridge, unified messaging etc... Pretty nice platform.

Thanks, guys. At the moment, I cancelled the support contract and I'm just recording data about my cards/chips/daughter boards and periodically checking ebay. Ghosted the HD from the VPU and frequent voice backups. Save the money for a system upgrade.