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Large-scale deployment


joeh

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We have a couple of customers who are after a "larger" scale PBX deployment (40+ users). This is larger than our typical deployment and I wanted to quiz people as to their experiences with such a deployment. This one particular customer wants the works, full call recording, CDR reporting, various hunt groups etc. This is going against competing solutions from Mitel etc, so has to work.

 

The network will be high spec, one dedicated for VoIP with a relatively high spec server (Decent CPU, RAID, 2GB RAM etc).

 

Comments and input are appreciated.

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We currently have over 75 pbxnsip systems deployed worldwide, 40+ users is no sweat. Use a good Patton or Audiocodes PRI gateway, good phones i.e. Polycom or Snom, and as long as the box is a Pentium 3.0 or so with a couple GB of memory, you will have no issues ..

 

I use the Netgear POE switches and they work quite well also ..

 

yori

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We have a couple of customers who are after a "larger" scale PBX deployment (40+ users). This is larger than our typical deployment and I wanted to quiz people as to their experiences with such a deployment. This one particular customer wants the works, full call recording, CDR reporting, various hunt groups etc. This is going against competing solutions from Mitel etc, so has to work.

 

The network will be high spec, one dedicated for VoIP with a relatively high spec server (Decent CPU, RAID, 2GB RAM etc).

 

Comments and input are appreciated.

From our limited experience so far, having 42 extensions, 64 accounts, a 7 line PSTN gateway trunk and a SIP trunk, and running about 200+ calls per day, pbxnsip will do fine with a strong server and network behind it. The main thing to insure is to have good phones - the phones will make or break the user experience - if they genereate echo (becuase of speakerphone quality) or have issues using pbxnsip features, then the user community will losse confidence in the system. Another key to watch for is the gateway - make sure it is rock solid and configured properly to any PSTN lines - we had a tough time at first getting the line termination and gain worked out to minimize echo and jitter.

 

I concur with Yori's findings as well. We have been using Grandstream devices (phones and gateway) and while we've been able to get the gateway to stabilze, the phones (GXP-2020 series and GXP-2000 series) are causing much trouble with echo (speakerphone issues). We went this way based on initial testing and price/performcne, but after "real" use, the performance is not there - yet. We are now beginning the process of testing other phones - at a higher price point.

 

Hope this helps....

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We use ISDN gateways from Parlay and Vegastream, both of which are solid. We stopped using Analogue FXO gateways due to the problems you mention, sometimes we'd get them working, only for echo and problems to occur later. Where possible - we always use ISDN. It is also much easier to troubleshoot than analogue .

 

In terms of phones, we use Snom primarily, although recently we've been using the latest Polycoms (550 etc) and the Linksys 941/962s. My only complaint about the Polycoms is they take an age to reboot following the slightest configuration change. Whilst we had a weird issue with the Snoms whereby if all the lights were subscribed to extensions and all those extensions rang simultaneously it would cause what could be described as a DOS attack. The LEDs would flash randomly for maybe 30 seconds before settling down - I guess because the phone's CPU was trying to process the notify messages\lights etc.

 

The server-load is my main concern, especially when all calls in and out of a hunt group will be recorded. Am I right in thinking PBXnSIP will hold the call in memory or will it write it straight to disk? The first case would require lots of memory whilst the latter would possibly require RAID0+1 or RAID5 if the number of concurrent calls is high.

 

I guess if you reach a point where one server can't cope, or isn't desirable - you could split the company and have two domains - dialling between the two with some dial-plan logic.

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