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

[Cees de Groot]

Steve Underwood  <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com> said:
>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.
>
Yup. Probably the biggest two sensitive items are disks and fans. The
latter can easily be redundanized and are in any well-designed
rack-mount box, and by employing SCSI disks or at least the more
expensive IDE disks, you can get good scores there as well. 

On our 14 server machines we've had 4 disk failures (only 1 of them
in a non-RAID, so that was downtime - but we keep spares, so that was
only a couple of hours) and zero fan failures since jan 2001, when
they were taken into production. Of course, the hosting environment
(21.5 deg. centigrade, controlled humidity, filtered air) will help a
lot here. I can imagine getting 96% if you put your server in an office
environment where people smoke and the cleaning lady now and then bumps
against it with the vacuum cleaner. YMMV.

Most downtime has been due to OS-level issues. And that's because we're
trying to squeeze too much out of too little hardware ;-). The boxes
that have been doing just one or two things typically go down only for
an OS upgrade. 

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.tric.nl     <cg at tric.nl>
tric, the new way           helpdesk/ticketing software, VoIP/CTI, 
                            web applications, custom development