<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><html>On Mar 19, 2008, at 1:00 PM, <a href="mailto:asterisk-users-request@lists.digium.com">asterisk-users-request@lists.digium.com</a> wrote:</html><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Am I expecting too much?</font></p> </blockquote></div><div><br></div>Perhaps.<div><br></div><div>I think the hardware on which we run Asterisk can be much more reliable than the software, which is often the case. We have a bunch of HP servers with RAID and have never lost anything. A HD may fail, but the RAID keeps it going until we pop a new drive in there. A server class PC with redundant power supplies and RAID is really quit inexpensive now. If you are running on a $1000 box, you can't expect the reliability of dedicated telco hardware.<div><br></div><div>As for Asterisk, reliability has been a concern. Concurrency issues keep cropping up (read bugs.digium.com), especially with the SIP stack. This is particularly the case with buggy clients (soft phones, and under high volume of calls.) However, in fairness, writing heavily threaded code in C is very hard to get right. I think testing could surely be better, perhaps come code reviews and more guidelines for writing threaded code.</div><div><br></div><div>We had an old hardware system and it wasn't without some issues. We needed to support around 30 call takers and another 50 hard phones. It took us a while in the 90s to get everything working acceptably. Our transition time with Asterisk has actually been shorter. Since we have a highly customized operation, going with a Avaya or Cisco solution would have cost in excess of $500K. With Asterisk, we spent maybe $50K on hardware (including a Cisco gateway, two Asterisk servers and some Polycom phones.) This cost is trivial compared to how much we pend on our yearly phone bill.</div><div><br></div><div>The great benefit to Asterisk for us was that everything is open source software and thus we can customize it. We wrote a custom app that plugs into Asterisk that handles all of our custom business rules and provides far more capabilities than our old (and very expensive) hardware solution. Since we already had a custom developed desktop application, we could plug in a SIP stack and further customize things to be just what we wanted.</div><div><br></div><div>I remember talking to a rep from a large reseller and listing our requirements, and he was amazed we could do all we were going on 90s technologies, since their new (and even more expensive) stuff couldn't without lots of "consulting". We had just two developers over 6 months go from zero to a full call center solution.</div><div><br></div><div>On the other hand, if I were to support a small office with 20 people and simple voice mail for mission-critical telecommunications, I'd likely get a hardware solution. They are reliable and not that expensive. Asterisk, for now, and in my opinion, is always going to require more interaction that other hardware solutions. But, it's cheaper and more flexible. You may not care about cheap and flexible, and if not, maybe it's not what you want.</div><div><br></div><div>I've not tested products like CallWeaver or others. People claim some of these are more reliable, but Asterisk seems more popular.</div><div><div><br></div><div><div><div>Norman Franke</div><div>Answering Service for Directors, Inc.</div><div>www.myasd.com</div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>