[asterisk-users] I need a second opinion on a new phone system deployment

[Daniel Tryba]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 10:28:50AM -0600, Nunya Biznatch wrote:
> Answer - There's a couple reasons I'm thinking this way, which may be
> misguided so thanks for making me think about it. First is redundancy.
> Offloading the PRIs and analog phones from the primary PBX means if
> there's an issue, I can take one of those PRI boxes down and not
> affect the PBX, and the other PRI box will continue to provide
> trunking services. Only the analog lines on that specific PRI box
> would be impacted. Second, I know I'll be transcoding G.711 to G.722
> on those machines, 46 PRI channels, and 48 analog lines. I've been
> unable to find anything solid that gives me a definitive idea as to
> how much horsepower I need. 

If you do it correctly (g722 as primary codec and fallback to g711) and
only accept g711 on the pri machines it costs you next to nothing. You
can't buy a new machine to slow for the job of filling those channels by
just bridging. But like others noted, you should really look into some
device to handle that for you. My choice of hardware is Patton
SmartNodes. They aren't cheap but in the past 8 years I have only seen 1
die (bad PSU).

You didn't mention it yet, but will there be recordings of calls?
Monitoring calls will keep the PBX in the loop. And I have been stung by
bad controllers resulting in bad performance (HP cciss comes to mind
with Debian/squeeze).