VAL Card Fail Over

[phonechic]

Does anybody know how to set up your system to failover to a second VAL card if your first one fails? We have 8700s in our call centers. We have had 2 VAL cards fail in 4 months between 2 call centers. The last failure took our call-center down for 2 hours. They did not have a spare card on site. They are claiming the VAL card failure some how effected the 2 way talk path – the agent could not hear the customer, but the customer could hear the agent. I don’t have much data because they closed the call center down and rerouted the calls. The first card failure involved losing the announcements and a high abandon rate when calls started to queue. Management would like an option that would give us zero down time when a VAL card fails. Any ideas.

 

[cwjr]

I've heard of folks doing it this way:

Obtain a second VAL board.
Make sure you have all of the original announcements downloaded to a PC.
Unseat the original board.
Seat the new Val board.
Upload the announcements.
Unseat the new and reseat the old, or just leave them as is.
If the seated board fails, unseat and re-seat the "spare".
You're back up in the time it takes to seat the spare.

You will have to maintain announcements on both boards by unseating, reseating, uploading new announcements, etc.

 

[phonechic]

Thanks. That's an option I will discuss with management. If anybody knows of an automatic switchover, I would appreciate any leads.