Perth Zoo quits monkeying with its analogue PABX

Perth Zoo is to move to a new IP telephony which will service the organisation for the next 10 years, according to the Western Australia Zoological Parks Authority (ZPA).

In ZPA documents, the organisation said that Perth Zoo’s existing PABX was over its intended service lifetime, at full capacity and had failing components.

The ZPA said the rip-and-replace solution would provide trunk and endpoint connectivity over the Internet should Perth Zoo choose to support IP telephony for remote end users in the future.

Perth Zoo plans to initially purchase the PABX and an estimated 52 handsets with the organisation’s remaining 57 handsets to be implemented on a gradual roll out program.

The existing Perth Zoo network is Ethernet based using HP ProCurve switches with no Power over Ethernet (PoE) switches currently in use.

Polytechnic West moves to WAN acceleration

In other Western Australian news, Polytechnic West has announced that it is currently in the process of consolidating a number of services and data from its network of distributed campuses across Perth as it moves to a central data centre based in Bentley

As part of the process the educational institution will implement WAN acceleration appliances in an effort to provide comparable functionality to locally installed file, print and email servers and other services.

The acceleration appliances will also help address challenges around the organisation’s disaster recovery set-up – currently sited in Midland.

“[The] site that utilises Storage Area Network Logical Unit Number replication technology that generates a large amount of network traffic and significantly impacts network bandwidth between the production and disaster recovery site,” Polytechnic West documents read.

“The replication cycle currently lags the production data centre by an excessive period of time which needs to be reduced considerably.”

In addition to accelerating various network protocols and application services, the solution will support WAN bandwidth throughput to facilitate 100Mb at its data centre, 50Mb at the its disaster recovery site and a minimum 20Mb at three other campus sites in the suburbs of Balga, Carlisle and Thornlie.