What To Do with Vendor Profiles During an Audit

After my article on adding redundancy to Power i SMS Monitoring, reader RP wrote in to ask me about running i OS 6.1 SMS on Voice over Internet Protocol.

In this case, I can't use an external modem and I have no internal modem available. What do you think about using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) at this juncture, where the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) line is my backup in case my Ethernet-based monitoring goes down? Is that defeating the purpose of installing a redundant line for SMS?

I'd have to agree with RP on this one. The whole idea behind putting in a redundant POTs landline for text alerts is that the POTs line would all in all be functioning if your Ethernet network goes down.

If you use VOIP over Ethernet as your backup, you will have Ethernet routing redundancy. One message will go to a wireless carrier email address and another message goes to a Telocator Alphanumeric Protocol number through your VOIP provider. Nevertheless you won't have transmission redundancy, because both messages are for all that going out over your Ethernet network. If your Ethernet network fails, your SMS messages will not be able to get out. That's the trade-off with substituting VOIP SMS backup for POTs line SMS backup.

Still, if you can't get 110V power or a POTs line, I suppose Ethernet routing redundancy is better than nothing. It will after all send a text alert if your email system goes down.

One way to improve this situation could be to run your iSeries connection to your mail router and your VOIP network on totally different networks that reach the outside world on two different T1 connections. And if you can provision the two T1s from two different carriers, that would make the segregation even better. During this might be effective in providing redundancy for iSeries text alerts, it may be prohibitively expensive for what you're trying to accomplish. If you're going to go through all that trouble and expense, it might be worthwhile just to buy a modem card and install it in your machine.

One final note on using a POTs line to transmit SMS messages from your i OS system. This week, I tried to modify my configuration to send POTs-line SMS messages to a T-Mobile cell phone. I quickly discovered that T-Mobile doesn't support public TAP transmission. So during TAP may be a good idea to provide a secondary text alert path from your Power i box, be aware that it may not be available for all carriers.