> But on a small office scale... handling 10 - 20 calls ... do you really > need all that horse power? Leaving the factor of TCO, does one really > need a Ferrari to go from Toronto to Mississauga - where a Honda 4 cyl. > would be more than enough? > > > Realistically speaking... within the confined office of 20 people, you can > obviously configure your IP phones to all negotiate at the same codecs. > Hence no transcoding involved... except perhaps the added options for call > monitoring, conference calls & voice mails.
For a small office you actually don't want a powerful machine, you want something as small and sleek as possible without any fans and something that looks really gadgety. But a 20 phone office isn't small. > > Please don't get me wrong... I'm ALL for Dual Proc., and support it 100%... > if the money is coming from someone else's pocket... and if cost is not a > factor... why not! But even in a small office of 20 people where all 20 > people are on the phone at the same given time... is a dual processor > really all that necessary from a technical perspective? As I mentioned before 20 people isn't considered small, a dual processor would increase the quality noticeably, and you would want a typical server, not an appliance. So for your customers, it would be wise to factor the cost of a dual processor in. People can understand flakey email service but not a flakey phone system. Going back to Jims post, a little while ago I installed vmware on a quad opteron and was experimenting to see if we can sell a virtual hosted * service to people but the voicemail and ivrs got really choppy just after 3 instances. I think overall the model that works for asterisk is, beyond something reasonable like a dual xeon, if u need more power, get another cheap computer and do some load balancing. --------- Shidan
