You can throw together a single P4 3GHz with 1GB RAM and 2 x 80GB SATA HD for about $600. One of those can easily handle a Sangoma dual T1 card($900) or a Digium quad T1 card($1400). For that you can have a system for about $1500-$2000 that will be able to fully record 2 T1s(48 channels) worth of Zap->SIP conversations. Putting two of those together with a nice big fileserver will give you a lot of flexibility, as well as only a reduction in capacity if one of the servers go down instead of a total outage, for about the same overall price of a single high-end Dual Xeon server. Building your system this way from the start will also allow it to scale much more easily than using just a single very expensive server. You can just add another 2 T1s of capacity at any time for just $1500.
I recommend only 50 or less recordings concurrently because that is the ceiling that we discovered while trying Zap->SIP recording on both Dual Processor server-class systems and single processor cheaper commodity computers as well as on SCSI, IDE and SATA drives. If anyone out the has reliabily done recording of more than 50 conversations I would like to know the hardware architecture of your setup. Thanks, MATT--- -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Salama [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 6:59 PM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Hardware Recommendation Thank you again. I will definitely do that. By "cheaper" asterisk servers, do you mean single-CPU machines that can handle Quad T1s and still do the call monitoring? BTW, I tried the monitoring without the 'm' option and mounted the audio directory via NFS. Big NO NO for everyone. Just do what Matt says: copy the -in and -out to archive server separately several times a day :) - don't record to NFS mounted drive. Thanks, Daniel On Apr 28, 2005, at 6:42 PM, mattf wrote: > I have never been able to do more than 50 concurrent recordings with > Zap -> > SIP phone calls without the audio skipping and/or breaking up. Also, > if you > are using Digium TE4XXP and want to do a lot of recording I would > recommend > against a SCSI RAID card because of the interrupt conflicts that you > will > run into over time. I would recommend a couple of cheaper Asterisk > servers > with a dual T1 or Quad T1 board in them and SATA drives, with a nice > big > archive server that the audio will be copied to several times a day. > Also, > do not record(Monitor) with the 'm' flag on because this will also > lead to > more disk read-write while you are already trying to write another 100 > or so > streams. Offload the -in and -out files to the archive server and let > it > soxmix them together instead. This is the method that we have settled > on for > our 12 Asterisk servers and it works rather well for us. > > MATT--- > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Daniel Salama [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 5:56 PM > To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion > Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Hardware Recommendation > > > Hi, > > I've been reading on the wiki as well as on this list, different > suggestions of what to look for when designing an asterisk server with > a lot of traffic. By "a lot" of traffic, I mean a box with a a TE4XXP, > that will be hit to full capacity (96 simultaneous calls). This box > will also deliver these calls to SIP users and record all their > conversations via Monitor. > > I've heard that it's not necessarily a matter of memory (RAM) nor the > need to have a multi-processor machine. But what really matters is that > the motherboard (architecture) is designed to handle such a high amount > of interrupts generated by the TE4XXP, the NIC, the storage array > (whether it's SCSI or IDE or SATA). > > Does anyone have experience with particular brands of either > motherboards they recommend are capable to handle this or complete > systems (e.g. Dell xxxx or whichever brands), that are ready for this? > > Thanks, > Daniel > > _______________________________________________ > Asterisk-Users mailing list > Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users > _______________________________________________ > Asterisk-Users mailing list > Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users