The MXgroup software license for an MX250 allows it to be part of a group of MX250 systems. This permits the extension of most features of an MX250 across multiple locations and therefore makes a company spread among multiple locations appear as one. Users at any one location can communicate with users at other locations in the same way that they communicate with users at the same location. You can configure a single group to include MX250 systems or MXclusters from 2 to 32 locations, which allows an enterprise to scale its deployment to 10,000 users. The MX250 systems communicate over a WAN or the Internet and are easily configured. No intervention is required by the users of the systems.

The Redundancy option on the MX250 provides automatic recovery during a hardware failure. The redundancy configuration uses an N+1 scheme where N can be one, two, three, or four MX250 boxes that services users during normal operation within a single deployment. The extra MX250 serves as a warm standby, which contains a mirror image of the configuration of the MX250 systems that run in normal operation. When an MX250 fails during normal operation, the standby MX250 automatically take over the failed unit with only a few minutes of down time. The redundancy option requires the additional purchase of the standby MX250 and an XRS12 chassis to switch the PSTN circuits. Only the redundancy license is required on the standby MX250; the mirrored configuration for licenses is not required.

The Advanced ACD option for the MX250 provides features that help to streamline call handling for companies that have dedicated call centers. An Advanced ACD group can be provisioned with 64 agents, and there can be as many as 60 calls in a queue. Features include call queuing, real time supervisory monitoring, detailed reports for agent and group performance, automatic logging out of unresponsive agents, music on hold, promotional messages while on hold. call quit options, queue prioritization, instant messaging between agents and supervisors, and queue overflow handling.

The fax option on the MX250 provides origination and termination of real time fax sessions directly on the MX250. This eliminates the requirement for external fax machines or servers. You can configure a system to handle up to 16 fax sessions. Fax resources can be shared among all users, so you can configure a fax DID separate from the voice DID for each user.

The MX250 can connect to Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs) for public SIP access to phone service. ITSPs can provide IP trunking for all business calls, eliminating the need for direct connectivity to the PSTN. At the SIP layer (application layer), ALG services translate the public IP address with private corporate addressing to allow phone calls between private IP phones within the corporate firewall to communicate with public SIP gateways. With ALG services on the MX250, a business can connect up to 50 simultaneous trunk calls through ITSPs.

The MX250 has internal capabilities for terminating up to 50 VPN (IPsec) tunnels from external VPN clients such as laptops, home routers, or IP phones. This ability is ideal for corporate deployments of the MX250 where there is no external VPN concentrator to terminate remote users. With VPN tunneling directly into the MX250, business can quickly extend MX250 voice and collaboration services to the few remote workers while providing a secure data access to corporate network servers.

This option allows the MX250 to terminate point to traffic running the point to point protocol (PPP). PPP is common in the USA and Canada to provide Internet traffic and is available only for T1 circuits.

The MX250 can be enabled this functionality for businesses who do not have an external firewall and NAT in their corporate network. This option allows you to add a firewall between the two Ethernet ports on the MX250 or between one Ethernet port and a T1 circuit that is terminating PPP. The MX firewall is a layer 3 and layer 4 device, with stateful inspection of the packets and a throughput of about 2 Mb/s.