Maintenance Manual

CHAPTER
2-1
Cisco ICM Enterprise Edition Administrator Guide Release 6.0(0)
2
Fault Tolerance
Intelligent Contact Management (ICM) software is a fault tolerant call routing
system that continues to operate without interruption in the case of hardware,
software, or communications failures. The main goals of the ICM’s fault tolerant
architecture are to:
• Minimize time periods during which the system is non-responsive to call
routing requests (for example, while the system is being reconfigured due to
a component failure or recovery).
• Eliminate all single points of failure that would cause the system to stop.
• Provide disaster protection by allowing the major system components to be
geographically separated.
The ICM’s fault tolerant mechanisms operate in the background and are not
visible from within ICM applications. However, it is still important that you have
a general understanding of the fault tolerant architecture and the implications it
has for system administration.
In some cases, the level of fault tolerance in the ICM system can affect which
administration tasks you need to perform. For example, in duplexed database
configurations many typical database administration tasks such as database
backups become unnecessary because exact copies of the central database are
kept on each side of the system on separate computers.
This chapter provides an overview of ICM fault tolerance with a special emphasis
on the fault tolerance of the Central Controller and the central database.