Evening all, I've got a customer that needs me to start doing some significant call volumes on Asterisk, and I'm just looking for opinons on hardware requirements from people who have done this before. I have a pretty good idea as to what I need, but I'm not sure, so I'd prefer to hear from people who have either done this, or at least close to this kind of call volume.
I need to take 4x T1's into an Asterisk box (92B + 4D) and transcode them from G.711 (ulaw) to G.729, terminating via SIP. I've been at VON this week in SJ, talking to the Digium guys, and opinions seem to hover around a box with 2x Intel Xeon CPUs running at 3.0GHz or higher. Has anyone had such luck with this type of configuration? I was originally looking at doing 184 channels in a single box, but that doesn't sound feasable without spending significant amounts of money -- it's going to end up being more economical (and probably just plain safer) to do this with a pair of boxes. Thats no big deal -- there's no real need to have it on a single box (the amount of overhead I'll add in electricity costs is going to be negligable). The second part of this question involves the use of the Dell SC1420 series of tower servers. It seems to be a great price at being around $4000 w/ 80GB SATA RAID, dual Xeon @ 3.8GHz, 2GB RAM and a 3 year support contract (4 hour turn around, 24 hour, 365 day). The support contract is NECESSARY for this deployment, thus I can't go use something from say... Penguin Computing. I've been using Dells with pretty good success thus far -- however not had to push one to this level, and I can't afford to screw this up for this customer -- so unfortunately have to get it right the first time (I hate to have to do that since of course testing is always a critical part of deployment, and I will get SOME testing time -- but I'll have already put the money into the servers obviously before I can test -- catch 22 stylez). I had heard some ill things from the SC series of Dell's, but hoping I can get away with it -- if you have a better suggestion for a series of computers, from any manufacturer (as long as I can have the same type of support contact from the manufacturer), then I'm all ears, but the pricing on the SC1420 is really in my ball park. I'm also not forcing myself into using either the Digium TE411p or TE410p series, or the comparable 4 port card from Sangoma -- so thoughts and experiences from that front is also welcome. I really just need to find a solution that works. I appreciate and look forward to your thoughts and the discussion! -- Leif Madsen. http://www.leifmadsen.com http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/asterisk
