Unifying Communications

The evolution of unified communications—where e-mails are accessed over the telephone and calls are made using a PC—can offer huge business opportunities for hosted service suppliers. Yet the demands for providing such unified communications are high. The software is processor intensive and relies on high-performance servers, which can be expensive to power and complex to manage.

These challenges were a concern for M Dados, a hosted services provider based in Portugal offering leading-edge communications technologies. The company, a subsidiary of the José de Mello Group, planned to roll out a suite of services based on Microsoft® unified communications software. The suite enables businesses to unite desktop telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, fax, Internet, legacy phone networks, and voice mail. Implementing and optimizing the new services, however, required high performance with a small footprint, low energy consumption, and simplified management.

This case study describes how M Dados worked with Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting Services to seamlessly transition to a new high-performance infrastructure to support these services. The new environment was based on a Dell™ PowerEdge™ M1000e modular blade enclosure housing PowerEdge M600 blade servers with quad-core Intel® Xeon® processors running VMware® virtualization software. Virtualization helped the company reduce the number of required physical servers by 40 percent while also helping reduce server provisioning time from days to hours and to reduce the risk associated with hardware failures. The energy-efficient Dell PowerEdge blade servers meet high performance demands while helping simplify management and scalability, and a Dell/EMC CX500 storage area network (SAN) can scale cost-effectively to help meet growing data requirements. And because M Dados has Dell ProSupport for IT, the environment can remain highly available both now and in the years ahead.

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