[asterisk-users] Asterisk Design Question

[Rich Adamson]

Remi Quezada wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Right now I am in the process of setting up an asterisk box.  I was
> thinking of having two asterisk box, one that is hooked up to the PSTN
> using a digium TE405P card and the other asterisk box will be used to
> store all the sip user features and routing information.  Do you think
> this a good design?  Or do you think I should just stick with having one
> asterisk box that does everything.  I plan on having a lot of users
> hooked up to it in the future.  The system specs are 3.0 GHz Pentium 4,
> 1 GB RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive.

I attended a cisco presentation a while back and they indicated the 
architecture of their system was changing somewhat (away from Windows, 
now on Linux, etc).

The presentation suggested that certain functions are dedicated to 
certain systems/boxes, and if one needed more of a certain function then 
add another box. For example, if transcoding is a requirement, then 
dedicated a box or two to that function. As the overall system grows and 
more transcoding is needed, add another box for that.

Since I'm not a cisco reseller, etc, I didn't keep very many notes 
relative to the above. But, the approach seems to be one that can 
support long term growth is small increments of hardware/software.

Your approach kind of follows cisco's in a way. The only issue (from a 
high level) that might be difficult to handle is that asterisk really 
wasn't designed to distribute functions to multiple boxes. E.g., if 
growth dictated two pstn interface boxes, how does one manage the 
distribution of pstn calls from a single routing box (including pstn T1 
failures, overloads, etc)?