Recommended specs for <25 agents

[smead]

We've been getting familiar with Vicidial on virtualbox up to now, but it's time to put this on a physical machine. What hardware specs would you recommend that could facilitate growing up to 20-25 agents, dialing on manual dial?

[williamconley]

Recording all calls? codec ulaw or g729? Inbound active? any other software running on the box?

Ordinarily, of course, we have found that a core2Quad is the best price break. Inexpensive enough and yet still quite powerful. If you're not up for that, a core2Duo can often be Easily Upgraded to a Quad later and may still handle 25 agents manual dialing without a problem.

2G RAM. 7200rpm SATA HD (any size will do, if you want to store recordings get a 2nd drive to put them on and keep them off your OS/database drive).

[smead]

Wow.

I appreciate the response, I was under the assumption that I would need far more ram. We would be recording all calls, yes. Using IAX and ulaw, although I'm not sure I understand the difference between the 2 codecs. Calls would be outbound, although we may experiment with a survey campaign in the future for a select number of agents.

We only have a few agents now, but want to make sure our system will allow us to grow.

[williamconley]

More RAM does help, but not as much as you would think. However, if you are recording calls it can be helpful to have more RAM. With manual dialing, 4G would be plenty. Often, RAM drives are used to store recordings in progress. When the calls complete, recordings are moved to the HD and then processed by the audio scripts in crontab (at the proper timed intervals). Obviously running low on RAM could create a problem with that process, but so far we've not had very many clients upgrade RAM even when recording calls.

[Kumba]

We usually spec out the following for an Express box, which is an all-in-one server designed for smaller call centers:

Quad-Core CPU 2.0Ghz+
4GB+ Ram
500-GB Raid1

It's a pretty inexpensive server to come by. Some considerations would be to double th ram to 8GB if you have long call times and are doing a lot of recording. Bigger hard-drives (1TB or 2TB) will also let you hold more recordings before having to do house keeping. Other then that you should be pretty much good to go with the specs above.

[smead]

Thanks for the responses guys. Bought a refurbished 2.4GHz quad core/4G Ram/500GB for $115. Should have it by the end of the week.