If you are a VAR looking for a powerful processing solution but don’t want a massive, power-hungry server to sell to your small office customers, perhaps consider the new Ceros Desktop Edition, to be released by Rhino Equipment in November 2009.
This “made in the USA” Ceros Desktop chassis was designed with VARs in mind. The steel chassis comes with no external markings or silk screening, and comes shipped in two cartons—an outside carton that can be discarded so that a pristine, inside carton can be cleanly shipped to your end customer.
The Ceros Desktop can be a primary PBX or easily used as a remote connection back to the main site as it is powered by a compact, 12 V DC power supply. It can be an open hardware server, if you need to replace a group of fax machines, extend some remote POTS lines with a VoIP trunk to a main office, or you just need a compact PBX for your business.
According to the company’s website, the product’s initial Base Configuration is planned as follows:
- Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU with 945 Chipset
- 80GB 2.5″ single hard drive (RAID1 also available)
- 1GB 667MHz DDR memory
- 65W external +12VDC power supply
- Two PCI slots (A Rhino ONLY!)
- Rhino SLI 6-line OSLI and 5-button keypad
- VGA Video, DVI Video
- Three USB ports
- One GbE (LAN) (2nd port available via one of the two PCI card slots)
The unit will be best suited for installations up to 25-50 users, though its computing power is spec’d to handle many more.
With space for up to two short form factor PCI cards it can handle up to 16 analogue channels of FXO or FXS using two R8FXX-EC modular cards or up to 24 Analogue FXO or FXS channels through use of a R1T1 card and channel bank combination.
The Ceros Desktop runs a standard Intel x86 processor and is therefore compatible with any PBX or Linux distribution you wish to use.
VoIPon is currently taking pre-orders for the Ceros Desktop, slated to ship in November 2009.
