[Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review

[Zoa]

Hi,


Could you please include if you used the software zaptel echo canceller
or the daughterboards for the te4xxp ?
As that would explain the difference in cpu usage.

I have no daughterboards for the te410p cards yet, nor do i own any
sangoma things, so no testing here.

Joachim.

Joachim.

Tom wrote:

> Thanks for the informative review Matt.  Please tell why you are using
> RBS T1 trunks instead of PRIs.  Is it the cost or availability issue
> from the ILEC/CLEC or is there some other advantage.  PRIs and RBS T1s
> are about the same price in my part of the world.
>
> Tom
>
> At 09:20 AM 4/7/2005, you wrote:
>
>> My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk:                      2005-04-07
>>
>> Having pushed my Digium Asterisk systems to their capacity many times
>> and
>> figuring out the limits of the Digium hardware I decided it was time
>> to test
>> an Asterisk-compatible Sangoma Quad T1/E1 card(AFT-A104u) to see if they
>> live up to their hype of being more efficient than the Digium
>> variety(T405P). I had talked with someone from Sangoma before at
>> Astricon,
>> but it was rather informal, he didn't have any literature and I was
>> rather
>> swamped at the time as it was. Then I saw a posting on the
>> asterisk-users
>> list about the claims that the Sangoma card does echo-cancelation
>> better as
>> well as using far less interrupts than Digium hardware(a big
>> bottleneck with
>> busy Digium systems).
>>
>> I emailed Sangoma(they are located in Canada) for a quote and quickly
>> received a phone call from them. They were very interested in getting my
>> feedback on using their quad port T1/E1 card with Asterisk and they
>> quoted
>> me a discounted price of $1190 US for the card(They said retail was
>> $1700 US
>> [Digium quad-cards are $1495 retail but you can get them through
>> resellers
>> for a couple hundred less]). The Sangoma card comes with a 30-day
>> money back
>> guarantee and a 3 year warranty.
>>
>> When I received the card I noticed a couple things right away, it was
>> a very
>> professionally packaged item and it came with 4 T1 cables in the box
>> as well
>> as documentation and all of the other pretty things you expect in a
>> retail
>> package. The second thing I noticed is that the card was compatible
>> with a
>> 2U form-factor(That's right, they crammed 4 T1/E1 ports together so
>> it can
>> fit in a 2U case vertically) This was achieved in-part because the
>> ports are
>> actually on a fixed daughter card, but it did bring up the thought
>> that they
>> could actually cram 6 ports on one of these cards :)
>>
>> Next I started to sort through the documentation and files on their FTP
>> site. I noticed something I wish Digium cards had: User-upgradable
>> firmware
>> on the board(I have previously had to return an early version of the
>> T410P
>> Digium board to get a newer one with newer firmware on it).
>>
>> Let the installation begin. I started by downloading and installing
>> Asterisk
>> as usual(zaptel, libpri, asterisk[version 1.0.6]), then I downloaded and
>> installed Wanpipe release 2.3.2 beta6. I could now see my card and
>> went into
>> the wancfg utility to configure my card. Here's when it stopped being a
>> smooth experience. I tried installing it by the asterisk instructions
>> found
>> on the FTP site(which I found out later were out of date and
>> incorrect) and
>> eventually it all worked up until the final starting step. The
>> drivers saw
>> the card, but said nothing was connected to them which I thought was a
>> strange problem since you don't have to have anything connected to a
>> Digium
>> card for Asterisk to fully startup. So I emailed tech support and walked
>> through some reconfiguration steps and then after a few more emails
>> back and
>> forth it came out that they had a problem with D4/AMI signalling on a
>> RBS
>> T1(which they say they will have a fix for at some undefined time in the
>> future). After switching the wanpipe config for the first span to
>> B8ZS/ESF
>> with a PRI T1 I was able to run ztcfg and asterisk. I placed some
>> test calls
>> and all went well, at least until I tried hooking up a live
>> RBS(Robbed-bit,
>> 24 full channels not PRI) E&M Wink T1. It turns out that the guys at
>> Sangoma
>> have never had a customer that used E&M Wink start and accordingly
>> they have
>> never tested their cards with it, and of course it didn't work. So
>> another
>> email and call to Sangoma and they started working on a fix. Two days
>> later
>> they added a Wink for wink start T1s and sent me a new version of the
>> software. I loaded it and it worked, but all audio and call detects
>> stopped
>> working if I tried to use more than 10 of the RBS T1 channels, so
>> back to
>> Sangoma for another new driver version. After a few days, and a few more
>> driver versions, they came up with one that seemed to fix all of the
>> problems I was having before so I did my simple stress test of
>> picking up,
>> hanging up and redirecting to meetme of about 52 Zap lines and all went
>> well. Now on to the performance testing.
>>
>> For a performance test, I swapped out an identically configured
>> machine that
>> had a Digium T405P with my test machine and put it live in company
>> inbound/outbound call center during off-hours to test(This server
>> usually
>> handles over 20,000 calls in/out a day with lots of recording going on
>> across T1s, SIP phones and some IAX2 trunks). This server has two RBS
>> T1s,
>> one PRI T1 and one Channel Bank. I placed a test call out of the channel
>> bank through the PRI and then started automated calls from the two
>> RBS T1s
>> to go into meetme conferences. The performance test ran great and it did
>> prove that there is reduced CPU usage on a Sangoma board as compared
>> to a
>> Digium board. For a running time of about an hour the CPU usage was
>> between
>> 30% and 50% lower with the Sangoma board on the identically configured
>> machine. This was just doing some random calling maintaining 48
>> conversations across all 4 T1s with calls lasting no longer than 1
>> minute.
>> With these results I was very encouraged and decided to put the card
>> into
>> production.
>>
>> The production machine that I was replacing is one of our higher-volume
>> Asterisk servers that routinely handles over 40,000 calls a day. To test
>> compatibility and reliability of all of the hardware aside from the
>> Sangoma
>> card, I ran the server in production with a Digium card with no problems
>> then the next day I put the Sangoma card back in and started it up.
>> About 5
>> minutes into production everything was going great, the load was very
>> low
>> for this machine and I was not noticing any channel_walk_lock
>> warnings like
>> I periodically see on Digium systems. Then at 10 minutes something
>> happened
>> and the card was not detecting Answers on any calls coming in or
>> going out
>> on either the PRIs or the RBS T1s. I had to reboot the machine to get
>> it to
>> start detecting Answers again. This was not good. I thought it was a
>> random
>> problem so we just started back up again, and then again after about 10
>> minutes it happened again. I then put the Digium card back in quickly
>> and
>> rebooted and the server finished out the shift with no problems. The
>> next
>> day I took the server out of production and started running some more
>> stress
>> test on it. I couldn't get it to duplicate what had happened the day
>> before
>> even at higher volumes of calls than it was handling in the live
>> envorionment. The next week we tried it again in production and the same
>> thing happened except this time the machine froze. I was pretty sure
>> that
>> this was an issue with RBS T1s so I put the machine to the task of doing
>> some PRI call routing between several Asterisk servers and it works just
>> fine now PRI-only with no problems.
>>
>> Overall it isn't as easy to install a Sangoma Quad-T1/E1 card on an
>> Asterisk
>> system as it is to install a Digium card. But the support is very
>> responsive
>> to installation problems and I'm sure as more Asterisk users try Sangoma
>> cards, the instructions will be updated more frequently and go more
>> in-depth
>> into the options offered by Sangoma cards. Throughout my tests I
>> installed
>> the Sangoma card and drivers several times on a few servers and by
>> the end
>> it was taking me about 10 minutes extra per install to get the
>> Sangoma cards
>> and their drivers ready for Asterisk usage.
>>
>> One minor confusing moment was realizing that Port 1 is on the bottom
>> of the
>> card unlike Digium where it is on the top. A minor annoyance with the
>> Sangoma quad T1/E1 card is that you need to create a wanpipe config
>> file for
>> each span on the card and use another utility to specify the order in
>> which
>> they are loaded. One more item of note is that you need to wait several
>> seconds after running 'wanrouter start' before you can start ztcfg or
>> asterisk, if you do not, the spans may not come up properly.
>>
>> I am conflicted partially because when you buy a Digium card from
>> Digium you
>> are directly supporting the company that is the primary contributor
>> to and
>> maintainer of Asterisk(not to mention the lead-developer and creator of
>> Asterisk is the CEO) and it is very important to support the core of
>> this
>> great application. It is important to note however that Sangoma has been
>> contributing code to GPL Asterisk for a while now(they just recently
>> started
>> contributing directly as Sangoma) and seems to be doing more development
>> with Asterisk as they get more Asterisk users as their customers. I
>> do hope
>> that Digium takes a look at what Sangoma was able to accomplish for
>> roughly
>> the same price point in a smaller form factor and will hopefully make
>> some
>> of the same advances in their cards in the future.
>>
>> I would not recommend a Sangoma card for a beginner user or those who
>> depend
>> on RBS T1s. Intermediate users and Asterisk Gurus who only use PRI
>> T1s might
>> want to try one of these cards if only to see if they can squeeze a
>> few more
>> channels of capacity out of their systems or get better echo
>> cancellation
>> and control of their card. There is no question that Sangoma has done
>> a lot
>> to improve on the zapata core hardware design and they will hopefully
>> drive
>> innovation in this growing market, competition is a good thing.
>>
>> Installation and test were done on Intel P4 systems running Slackware
>> Linux
>> 10.1 with a custom 2.4.29 SMP kernel.
>>
>> MATT---
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Asterisk-Users mailing list
> Asterisk-Users at lists.digium.com
> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>   http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 254 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20050407/6cde8a9b/signature.pgp