Altigen on DELL PowerEdge Server

[kghammond]

Does anyone know if Altigen Altiware OS will run on a DELL PowerEdge Server? Our data center is full of PowerEdge servers except for our Altigen phone system. Our current phone system is nearing the end of its life. 5+ years on the single IDE drive is quickly becoming one of our highest risk factors in our data center.

Ideally we would like to move Altigen to our standardized DELL PowerEdge infrastructure with DELL DRAC card's, etc.

Does anyone have any experience running or trying to run Altiware OS on a DELL PowerEdge server?

Thank you,
Kevin

 

[KarmaRanOverDogma]

Yeah, probably not going to work. Altiware software runs on a variety of Windows Operating Systems and with the exception of the services, almost all of the work is performed by the communications boards. I was considering the same thing (Dell Rack Server) when we were opening a branch office with very limited rack space. The problem is the size of the communications boards used in the Altigen servers. They are too deep/long to fit in many rack mountable servers. In addition, I've had some vendors of Altigen systems tell me that there is a possibility of noise pickup from the server bus. As for your single IDE issue; if you have the room you could simply add a two port RAID controller and two new disk drives - ghost the old drive to the new hardware RAID mirror. I did this in another one of our branch offices. Finally, some Altigen vendors may not support the configuration or maybe only help you out with the Altigen specific hardware and software. I was looking for a 1U option but you may well find that a larger Dell server will work. Contact your vendor or Altigen directly and inquire about the size of the communications boards then run that by your Dell Account Rep.

 

[kghammond]

Thank you for the thoughts. I have been looking at the DELL PowerEdge 2600 series in a rack mount configuration. The server comes with 7 PCI slots, six which are definately full-length slots. I am not sure about the 7th. Also, does anyone know if the cards need to be in either 3.3v or 5v PCI slots? Are the Altigen cards compatable with 64 bit PCI-X slots as well?

The bus noise is interesting. I wonder if anyone has ever tested this or not.

Our current chassis is not large enough to add a second hard drive or any additional RAID controllers, so no matter what we do, we need to replace our current chassis.

Thank you again,
Kevin

 

[6562529712]

I think if you can put the board into the chassis, it might work. But ..... AltiGen tech support will refuse to support it using your own chassis. AltiGen's QAs only test AltiGen's boards with AltiGen's chassis.

The reliability of a Phone system is important. Please don't risk it.


AltiGen Engineer.