My theorical hw configuration

[DarknessBBB]

Hi guys,
I've searched a little bit around for an optimal hardware configuration and this is what I've thinked

Scenario: 2 Asterisk Server + 1 Web/DB Server for 20 agents, full time recording and 3.0 ratio outbound dialing. Using 2 E1 PRI lines.

3x PROCESSOR INTEL QC Q9300 1333MHZ BOX
3x MAIN BOARD INTEL BOXDQ35JOE Q35 DDR2 MATX
6x MEMORY CORSAIR XMS/DHX KIT 2048MB 800MHZ
3x CTRL 3WARE 9650SE-4LPML KIT 4CH. SATAII, PCI-EXPRESS X4, RAID 0,1,5,10, LOW PROFILE, 256MB
12x HDD WD SATA RAPTOR 74GB 10,000RPM (Raid 1+0)
1x SWITCH ZYXEL 24 P 10/100 +2P 1000 ES-1124
1x SWITCH ZYXEL 5 PORTS ZYXGS-105A


I'm a little bit worried about raid controllers, are they compatible with slackware?
What do you think in general?

Thank you very much

[mflorell]

This should work rather well. Not sure about the 3ware RAID card. I usually use LSILogic(non PCIexpress) cards.

If you are recording all calls with SATA drives I would strongly recommend using RAM drive for recordings.

[DarknessBBB]

Thanks for answering Matt.
Do you think 1 GB of Ram Drive will be ok if I create a script that every 10 minutes transfers the recs on the hard drives?

[Op3r]

Darkness

that should be fine.

[mflorell]

512MB would be fine for the RAM drive actually if you move the recordings off every 5 minutes, and the existing AST_CRON_recording... scripts can do the moving of the recordings off of the RAM drive for you as well.

[aster1]

For 20 agents , i dont think it would be any problem if you directly save voicefiles to hard disk without a ram disk , still it would be a good idea if you are planning to grow to more seats in future .

[mflorell]

If you are using SATA drives and are recording all calls directly to them the drives WILL fail within a year. I have had this happen on 3 systems that I built and 2 client systems that were prebuilt servers.

The problem is with the 44-byte chunks that Asterisk audio is written to drives in. There is no buffer so your harddrives have to work hard to keep up. Also, the resulting files are incredibly fragmented.

I strongly recommend using either a RAM drive or SCSI drives if you will be recording all calls.

[aster1]

Thx for info, i didn't have that detailed info and was thinking that there might be some kind of caching and file might be written after full recording is done .