On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 3:22 PM, JD Austin <jd@twingeckos.com> wrote:

Rhino does make good hardware.

Another local vendor is Xorcom; while their parent company is based in Israel XorcomUSA is based in Phoenix.

The only thing I like about Xorcom hardware over Rhino is that it scales a little easier.  It is USB2 based so you don't have to worry about whether the motherboard is compatible with PCI cards (3v/5v), you can fit a lot of telephony hardware in a small amount of space (for example this install: http://picasaweb.google.com/twingeckos/FortPolkJointReadinessTrainingCenter#), and it generally comes out at a slightly lower price for the customer (sometimes significantly less).  

That said... I don't care for the XR1000 server that Xorcom sells as it is too underpowered to expand (ok for demos) but the XR2000 and XR3000 servers are fine; they will be coming out with a more powerful XR1000 soon thankfully.  

Yes, I agree!

voip-info.org is a one stop reference for all things Asterisk, BTW.
 

Sangoma also makes fine Asterisk telephony hardware.  I haven't tried any of the Chinese Digium knockoffs and probably never will.  I don't recommend mixing different vendor's Asterisk telephony hardware as it is very un-likely that the combination has been tested by either vendor.  

For 'roll your own' servers I recommend Server Micro hardware.

I agree, provided the cards are installed right (PCI conflicts); if you are using Digium or Rhino cards.  I have not used the Xorcom USB2 stuff.

Since the phones are what users actually touch get good phones :)  For phones I generally prefer Polycom or Aastra phones.  You can use Cisco phones if you flash them with the SIP firmware (there is chan_skinny for Asterisk but why complicate matters); you may have to set qualify=no to avoid registration issues.  

I don't see any benefit using Cisco phones over Polycom?  It's nice to have a well supported firmware also.