[Asterisk-Users] Inbound call center - reliability \ scalabil ity with queues

[Ilan Rabinovitch]

Matt,

Are you doing any call recording / monitoring?  What percentage?  

Ilan

On 5/23/05, mattf <mattf at vicimarketing.com> wrote:
> For an inbound call center with 4 T1s and 30-50 agents on you would do just
> fine with a single, one-processor machine. We have handled more than this on
> a single P4 server although we use astGUIclient instead of Asterisk queues,
> but the load is very similar. I would recommend a Sangoma Quad T1 card
> because they are about 30% more efficient than Digium T1 cards.
> 
> When you say that you need to scale to 100s of consecutive calls, is that
> closer to 200 or 900? and what timeframe is that planned for?
> 
> We have a distributed in/outbound call center environment across 4
> geographic locations with over 20 T1s connected so it is possible for
> Asterisk to handle over 1000 consecutive calls across the system if you
> design it right. One of the reasons we don't use Asterisk queues, other than
> the difficulty in customizing the code to work with the ManagerAPI and
> client apps, is that it was hard to scale across multiple servers. That's
> why we use the astGUIclient suite which is more customizable and scalable
> across multiple servers, although (and it pains me to say this because we
> developed it) it is not as easy to install and setup than just creating an
> Asterisk queue.
> 
> We use a combination of SIP, IAX and Zap client phones depending on the
> system and the user and yes 711 is always best to use when you can. And if
> you have many remote phones using a codec like GSM it may actually be better
> to have a dedicated machine doing nothing but the transcoding from GSM->711
> and then just using IAX or a crossover Zap T1 to the inbound server to
> reduce processor load.
> 
> In any case it is always advisable to have a backup server that is fully
> ready to jump in production with a minimum of reconfiguration.
> 
> A couple more questions, will you do much recording? and what kind of disks
> do you plan on using?
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> MATT---
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Warren Smith [mailto:warren at serverplus.com]
> Sent: Monday, May 23, 2005 8:12 PM
> To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Inbound call center - reliability \ scalability
> with queues
> 
> 
> We are wanting to move off of our legacy inter-tel phoneswitch and move to
> VoIP and asterisk.  We are looking for a new PBX because the inter-tel
> switch is too difficult to integrate our existing (and new) software into.
> 
> We are a technical support center.  All our calls currently come in on toll
> free numbers via T1's, and there are 3 of them.  I want to use a media
> gateway to convert the T1's into SIP VOIP (I want reliable hardware for the
> gateway), and use asterisk as the PBX having all incoming and outgoing
> channels as SIP.  Almost all dialplans will be using Queues, and there will
> likely be no more than 10 queues, with (currently) about 80 incoming
> toll-free numbers.  There are approximatley 30 agents, but as of right now
> there are no more than 15 agents logged in at a time.  We need to be able to
> support 60-70 simultaneous calls initially and we have to be able to do this
> reliably.  We also need to be able to scale into the 100's of simultanous
> calls range.
> 
> What would be the best option, to have 2 powerful machines (dual
> powersupply, ) with one as a hotswappable backup or have multiple machines
> with a sort of load balancer setup?  Having multiple machines could possibly
> cost less, but I'm not sure how the queues and agents would be managed
> across multiple machines.  I.e. how would the agent 'login' to each asterisk
> machine so that the calls could be handed to it, and how would the calls get
> handed to an available agent by 4 seperate asterisk machines?  I've read
> through the wiki, but I'm not sure how much overhead queues would put into
> the system.  I want to have all the codecs the same, so the asterisk
> machines doesn't do any transcoding, and have all channels as SIP.  There
> will be music on hold.  Would a dual 2.8 ghz xeon in this config be able to
> handle 80 simultaneous incoming calls?  Would using the 711 codec make a
> difference in available processing power?
> 
> I'm sorry if this has been answered a million times already, I just didn't
> see many configs close to what we're trying to do to compare to.  Thanks for
> any input you may have.
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