[Asterisk-Users] Reasons why I shouldn't use Asterisk?

[Steve Underwood]

WipeOut wrote:

> Gavin Hamill wrote:
>
>> It would seem an odd question, but I'm trying to put together a little
>> presentation on 'Why Asterisk?' and need to list Pros and Cons.... I've
>> got plenty of Pros (including the availability of commercial support),
>> but the only Con I can think of is 'Relatively few installations
>> worldwide'
>>
>> Can anyone think of any others?
>>  
>>
> No built in high availability or clustering options making it as 
> reliable as the harware, OS and apps..
>
> Last time I looked it up PC systems combined hardware components 
> average reliability was about 96% uptime(This was a while back so the 
> percentage may not be accurate).. This is a problem for telecom's 
> system whos uptime is usually measured in years and not a percentage 
> of 1 year..
>
> No flames please, I realise that there are issues involved with the 
> PSTN lines, channel banks and some other things in a clustered senario..
>
> Later..

96% uptime would mean nearly 4 hours per month down. I have never 
experiemced anything that bad using the nastiest crappiest no-name 
server parts..... unless you want to make a point, like some authors do. 
Then you say the hard disk failed and it took a week to get and install 
a new ones, so the downtime was 24x7 hours. In reality, if your service 
support doesn't stock all the important bits for quick replacement, it 
provides no service at all.

I have typically found Linux and even SCO Openserver on x86 servers have 
better up time than the fully redundant machines from Stratus. Their 
hardware may not fall over, but their OS does. When it does it takes 1 
to 2 hours to reboot.

Regards,
Steve