TheProper Care and Feeding of Your TeleVantage Phone System

Just as proper care and feeding generate a positive response and increased longevity for flowers, the proper care of your TeleVantage system can make a difference in extending its life.  While software is the heart of TeleVantage, the server hardware is the outer armor which protects the software.  Alas, this armor is often neglected in terms of its environment and treatment.  Here are some ways that you can care for your system and thereby extend its life and fortitude:

--Create a proper environment.  If you have a root ball of telephone and computer cables that connect to your computer servers, it only gets worse with time as you grow and add computers or phones to your network.  Bite the bullet and professionally organize your cabling so it is out of the way and protected from moisture or physical damage.  Also create a proper area of your shop for your electronic technology consisting of TeleVantage and also your other network servers.

This ensures that dirt and water do not mingle with your technology.  They make bad bedfellows! 

--Keep your server in an isolated and cool location.  Servers thrive in mild temperatures less than 65°F. Overheating can result in failures of power supplies, disk drives and computer processors that limit the lifetime of your computer systems and cause downtime and outages at the worst possible time for your phone system.  By keeping your system out of harms way, there is less likelihood of the server being used as a shelf or coffee table, and therefore less chance of it being bumped or spilled on, both of which can cause damage to the box and your company communication data.

--Servers can be dust catchers.  Take a moment to dust the outside, especially where fans and ventilation are located to ensure that excess dust does not clog its ‘pores’ which can result in overloading of the system.  Schedule this maintenance at least twice per year, perhaps at daylight savings time to make it easy to remember.

The conditions mentioned above seem like very basic issues but they have been taken from our actual history of real cases in our trouble support database.  The measures we suggest, while simple and clear cut, can extend the life of your system and will surely help to minimize performance issues.

So clean up your system…then go out and smell the roses.

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