On Monday 05 September 2005 11:49, Ray Payne wrote: > I'm putting together an Asterisk system that if successful I will roll out > in a couple of offices. I'm planning on using the TDM400P cards from > Digium. (They are not purchased yet so I'm also open to suggestions of > best places to buy them.) Does anyone have experience with systems that > are robust enough I could use them for high availability? The other side > of this is if anyone knows of systems I should avoid. Up to now I have > been doing all my testing on a cheap white box PC that I wouldn't want to > put into a production environment. I've done a fair bit of searching > online about this but I'd like to just make sure before purchasing.
What's wrong with whiteboxes? Seriously? Every single system I've ever put into production (including numerous Asterisk boxes) has been a whitebox, with the singular exception of a 4U dual xeon system with redundant power. (my rackmount stuff is whitebox guts, just 2U or 4U cases.) PC systems simply don't fail that often and if you've got another system sitting on a shelf you can swap it out and be back up within an hour, so long as one of the hard drives (software RAID1) survived. I've seen this sentiment over and over again and frankly I think 99% of it is just an excuse to bring in fun hardware rather than any kind of serious reliance on the platform. Hell look at any big cluster: white boxes. They're cheap and reliable and, when ganged up, their reliability rivals the expensive brand-name server systems. No amount of service contract or big-name sticker on the box can replace the peace of mind of having another sitting on the shelf in the same room. </rant off> Where to get the TDM cards? There's voipware.ca based out of Ottawa and another one I can't think of at the moment in Toronto. You can always go direct from Digium too, as they seem to control the pricing fairly tightly anyway. -A.
