Re: [hylafax-users] large multiport systems

["Darren Nickerson" <darren.nickerson@ifax.com>]

> I've looked through the faq done lots of googling and have seen mention of
> people using HylaFax with 30-48 modems using multiport serial cards and
> relatively old hardware (PPro systems), or single port [T1|E1]/modem cards
> such as Eicon's.  I have a customer interested in setting up a few large
> fax servers (perhaps ~200 ports per system).

Great!

> For scalability and management, T1/modem cards (like Eicon's) would be
> ideal, but cost concerns will likely force them to go with external
> rackmount modems and multiport cards...likely Cyclades Cyclom-64Ze's
> unless there are much cheaper T1/modem cards that work well with Linux and
> HylaFax.

Why do you think the Eicon solution is going to be more expensive??

The single most important decision you and your customer need to make is the
choice of modem (or fax board). It's worth thinking through very carefully,
both in terms of their requirements now, and in the future.

Let's assume you decide to go the Cyclades board and analog modem route.
You'd be well advised to select Multitech's V.92 modems, and the
MultiModemZBA V.92 retails for $179. Take 24 of those, and throw in the
Cyclades 64 port expander ... well I'll let you do the math but you're close
to the $4999 price of an Eicon board.

What you're not taking into account, however, is the cost of a T1 from your
telco, and the cost of 24 messy analog lines (both monthly recurring and
toll charges). In many cases the T1 will be considerably cheaper in terms of
the monthly recurring cost ... long term this can mean big savings! Perhaps
you're also not taking into account the fact that you can leverage the V.34
capability of the EICON boards, as well as the ECM error correction and MMR
compression to get better throughput than you can get from the analog
modems. Less time on the phone is a smaller phone bill, and these savings
will be ongoing for the life of their setup. If you run the Multitechs with
the latest firmware in Class 2.1 then you can get similar performance to the
EICON board, but those modems have been traditionally best run in class 1
due to firmware bugs ... a sitituation which is gradually improving (we have
customers who run the MultiTechs in Class 2.1).

> Assuming the systems will be used primarily for broadcast (1 page faxes
> converted once, then sent to many recipients) is it reasonable to expect a
> modern PIII/PIV based Linux system to send 200 or more faxes
> simultaneously?

You'll want a fast filesystem, decent RAM, and an excellent CPU if you plan
to have much of a backlog ... the faxq scheduler starts to bog down at over
10,000 jobs in the queue on slower systems. There's also a bug in HylaFAX's
FIFO handling that causes HylaFAX to lose track of faxgettys and/or fax jobs
when you start to get this backlogged, or alternatively when you have more
than 50-100 faxgettys firing at once (we'll be posting a fix to HylaFAX's
bugzilla - http://bugs.hylafax.org - in the coming weeks).

Some of our customers have 60-90 outbound channels and backlogs in excess of
twenty-thousand, and so we've gotten quite creative in expanding HylaFAX's
performance lately ;-)

Hope this helps.

Sincerely,

--
Darren Nickerson
Senior Sales & Support Engineer
iFax Solutions, Inc. www.ifax.com
darren.nickerson@ifax.com
+1.215.438.4638
+1.215.243.8335 (fax)


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