[asterisk-users] Serving 120 concurrent calls

[Gordon Henderson]

On Thu, 12 Mar 2009, Tarek Sawah wrote:

>
> Hello,
> a local prison contacted us regarding some calling card solution.
> they need 4 E1s to serve 120 rooms in that prison.
> we are planning on using 4 servers to serve the calls and one for the database
> servers' specifications are:
> 2.8 Dual Core Proccessors
> 2 GB Ram
> 160 Sata Drive
> each server will be provided with 1 E1 card

I'm rather surprised that you're using 4 servers - especially when I have 
1GHz boxes handling a full E1 lines without breaking into a sweat...

> Questions are:
> 1- will those servers be able to handle that ammount of calls?'

Just ONE of those servers ought to be able to handle all those calls. 
You're not doing any transcoding, so it's just a data moving platform.

They (Digium, etc.) make 4-port E1 cards... What sort of processor do you 
think those ought to be connected to?

> 2- the important issue is that they require call recording on all 
> calls.. which means we will have to record ALL calls going out of the 
> system .. which means we will need a call recroding.. will the four 
> Asterisk servers handle the recording process or we will need external 
> assistant? and if it was the second choice what is the best suggestion? 
> is there a way to force an Asterisk server to record remote channels?

Do the sums: 120 x 64Kb/sec x 2 = 15360Kb/sec or 1920KB/sec or just under 
2MB/sec. Any PC built this decade can do that.

Of-course multiple servers could be for some sort of redundancy setup... 
But if not, I'd be really surprised if just one box had any issues with 
that call volume.

Gordon