[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Hardware Recommendation

[mattf]

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:dsalama at user.net]
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:dsalama at user.net]
> 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
>
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