[asterisk-users] Small PC to build and run Asterisk

[Paul Hayes]

On 14/06/10 18:11, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jun 2010, Chris Bagnall wrote:
>
>> Actually, the Atom seems to be surprisingly powerful. We have a couple of
>> Atom boxes with transcoding and conferences enabled without issue. I
>> wouldn't pretend it'll cope with hundreds of conference participants, but
>> with ~10 or so it seems to be fine.
>
> I'll second the Atoms - I have several in the data centre handling VoIP,
> virtual PBXs, etc. And you can now get fanless motherboards. Bliss.
>
> Even using a few as general purpose LAMP servers too - the data centre I
> use doesn't charge per amp, but it's coming, and already there in most big
> places - in the UK, anyway - it seems Amps cost more than Gb)
>
>> Likewise with transcoding - we've only really tested up to ~30 channels with
>> G.711 to GSM, not any of the "heavier CPU workload" translations (e.g. iLBC
>> or G.729).
>>
>> For a small to medium office (e.g. 30 extensions, 10 concurrent calls) it
>> works fine, even with a little conferencing and transcoding.
>
> I do that with a 500MHz AMD Geode ... (no transcoding though - benchmarked
> it to 85 concurrent calls, handling the media streams - limit these boxes
> to 60 extensions though)
>
> Gordon
>

+1 for Atom based systems.  I use them too (although we build the 
systems ourselves).  It really is quite powerful hardware, has no 
problems transcoding, conferences, multiple ports of ISDN BRI or a 
single PRI.  I'd  be happy using one of these up to 50 extensions with 
15-20 concurrent calls.

I use an Atom based system at home too which is running OpenVZ with 
things like apache tomcat, asterisk, nfs server etc... all running at 
the same time.

cheers,
Paul.