Alcatel-Lucent Software Lifecycle Policy

Alcatel-Lucent will fully support and bug-fix software within two years of release, and for a further year for add-on configurations.  Problems arising from configurations outside of the lifecycle policy may be subject to a forced software upgrade.  Software Evolution Maintenance Packages are available offering free of charge equipment and software updates (engineering resource not covered).

Equipment Newsflash

Relating to Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise (4400) CRYSTAL Architecture CPU6 and CPU7-1


The CPU6 and CPU7-1 Processor Cards, due to their age and the difficulty of sourcing their components have now been labelled “end of life” by their manufacturer, Alcatel-Lucent.

Their direct replacement will be either the CPU7-2 or External Appliance Server.

How does this affect Customers currently using these cards?

Where a Customer wishes Amillan to maintain a CPU6 or CPU7 – this will be available on an ongoing basis (dependant upon the system software being within the 3 year lifecycle policy).  However, in cases of a complete CPU failure, there will come a time when we are no longer able to source a replacement from stock.  At this stage the Customer may be forced to upgrade to a replacement option.

Customers wishing to upgrade their software who have a CPU6 or CPU7 in place and running system software older than 7.1lx, will be maintained on a “best endeavours” arrangement.  Spare parts and software revision availability will deplete and the only course of action in this case may be a forced software and hardware upgrade.

Customers who wish to take advantage of a CPU6 or CPU7 upgrade can do so by replacing it with either the single card CPU7-2 solution or an external appliance server.

Advantages of the External Appliance Server

Spatial redundancy – Dual processors can be separated and housed in different locations across a LAN/WAN connection.  This allows a disaster recovery scenario without the expense of duplicated licenses.  It also offers the highest levels of resilience.

High speed processing.

Capacity to support large configurations, CTI applications, IP technology etc offering the highest levels of availability.

The servers offer dual NICs for resilience and load-balancing.

In distributed system designs, the Appliance servers allow the use of the Passive Call Server in remote branches offering those sites autonomy and “keep-alive” functionality.