On Tue, 2 Jan 2007, Mark Greene wrote:
Hey guys,
In your experience what is the best way to go for a production asterisk box
in your offices? With desktop prices so cheap you might think that you
should just buy them off the shelf, but is that really a reliable machine?
Anything you can tell me that would assist me in deciding the best way to
obtain and maintain these boxes would be very helpful. I have even looked
into building system myself that have no moving parts, but for about the
same price I can build an immensely more powerful machine WITH moving parts.
The best hardware is the hardware that you're most familiar with - the
hardware they you know will be reliable and know how to fix it if/when
it goes wrong.
And yes, you do end up paying slightly more (sometimes) for smaller,
quieter, and no-moving parts kit. It's all to do with volume of sales I
guess!
If you have a computer/comms room with servers, etc. already in-place,
then noise isn't going to be an issue for you, but you still want
reliability. So if you are having moving parts (ie. disks!) then get two
and run them in a RAID-1 (mirror) configuration. Think about redundant
PSUs. (and UPS - and UPS the Ethernet switch, and think about PoE) Fit
good ball bearing fans and if building it yourself, good thermal grease.
Soaktest the system before it goes live.
For some production machines, I'm using mini-ITX boards - 1GHz processors,
fanless, diskless (boot off flash) but they aren't without their
limitations (I doubt they'd be happy in a 100-extension office for example
;-)
But I am currently looking at a 150-line system, but I'm still going to
boot it off flash, just to reduce one failure point in the system...
Gordon
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