Best practice: sizing an X5 for a 30k-subscriber rollout

Question

We're planning a rollout across three cities: about 12k, 10k and 8k subscribers respectively, all on GPON. Docs suggest X5 tops out at 50k subs, but I'd like to hear from anyone actually running >25k on one. What's your CPU headroom look like, and did you enable failover to a second X5 or run standalone? Also curious about RAM sizing — we're planning to add IPTV in year 2.

Lea Marino · Accepted Answer

Running an X5 at 34,000 subs (GPON only) for 8 months now. CPU sits around 45% typical, spikes to 65% during evening prime. RAM usage is the boring one — 62 GB of 128 GB used. IPTV added maybe another 15% CPU when we turned it on, so you'll be comfortable at 30k. Standalone is fine unless you have a formal RPO/RTO to hit.

Hana Tanaka · Answer

We're at 41k on a single X5, no failover partner. Same story as Lea — plenty of headroom. My advice: get the second X5 anyway for the year-2 IPTV move so you have a warm standby before you double the workload.

Rahul Desai · Answer

Adding: if you're planning IPTV, budget the extra RAM early. NOS caches the channel guide + entitlements aggressively and a memory bump was cheaper than we thought.