Enterprise Fax Server CPU, GPU & RAM requirements

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by mgookin, Jun 18, 2009.

  1. Does anyone on here maintain an intensive enterprise level fax server?

    I'm going to set one up and have everything automatically print to pdf. A user will visit the fax server daily and route incoming faxes. Daily volume will range from zero to 1,000+ pages.

    My concern is that when someone sends 100+ sheets and another or the same someone sends another 100+ sheets right behind it, the system will run out of GPU or RAM, so I'm wondering how intensive of a workout your system gets and if you could reccommend hardware requirements for me. I could build a box on steroids but would rather just use one of our existing unused HP XP boxes laying around unless someone's experience advises to the contrary.

    Thanks in advance.
     
  2. jem

    jem

    you should set up the server software to send out an email immediately to an email address at gmail and then have gmail save and forward to yahoo or hotmail.

    you will always have back up.

    My company gets a few hundred pages a day and we send out a few hundred as well. I have found that the electronic faxing services are the way to go for us.
     
  3. Thanks but it has to be in house for compliance and business continuity purposes. I also can't have the information sitting on mail servers in cyberspace just because of the information on the faxes. We have nightly offsite backups plus mirrors with shadowing so I'm not worried about backups. Just looking to set up an efficient inhouse system without throwing more money at it then necessary.

    I came across some "professional enterprise" fax servers which seem like junk little boxes. These companies are bragging about having Pentium IV processors and "a full gb of ram". And the money they get is outrageous. Almost seems like I can take a little xp box with a 2 core cpu and have much more then what's being sold commercially.

    I just don't want to add Fax Server role to my dB server or file server because I hate stacking everything into one.
     
  4. DannoXYZ

    DannoXYZ

    Personally, I would go with dedicated and specalized hardware. Such as a Castelle FaxPress 5000.
    http://www.castelle.com/products/fp5000.htm

    Nice thing is it routes faxes based upon email-address so no manual sorting needed.

    BTW - GPU isn't used in any way with fax-software. The queue is just like a print-queue, it sits as files on the hard-drive. You can queue up 100,000 pages if you want it won't hurt the server in any way. The only thing that's stored in RAM is the current page being sent and perhaps a couple of extra ones.
     
  5. I had looked at their redundant server but chose not to move on it becuase their specs seemed way outdated. I'm just going to set up an XP box over the weekend and stress test it and see what happens.

    Thanks for the input.