[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk Hardware Recommendation

[Matt Roth]

Does anyone have experience with using NAS 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage) or SAN 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_network) for this application?

Matthew Roth
http://voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Running%20Asterisk%20on%20Debian

Daniel Salama wrote:

> Sure.
>
> I setup a small lab on a machine with 4 T1s and 36 agents logged in.  
> The system was configured to Monitor all outbound calls as well as  
> monitor all calls distributed by Queue app (monitor-format setting in  
> queues.conf).
>
> When recording to local disk, everything was working fine. Agents 
> were  busy 99.5% and there were at least 30 calls waiting in Queue to 
> be  distributed. Average call conversation length was about 7.5 minutes.
>
> Then I mounted /var/spool/asterisk/monitor via NFS using 10/100 Fast-E.
>
> The moment we pushed the load on the Asterisk machine, everything  
> worked for about 40 seconds. Then call quality started suffering  
> significantly. Chopped audio. Bad audio. No audio. Good audio. You  
> could imagine. So we stopped the test.
>
> Then we unmounted the NFS drive and repeated the test again. 
> Everything  worked fine again.
>
> The machine we tested asterisk on is a dual Xeon 3 GHz with 2G RAM.  
> During all tests, CPU utilization was about 55% on the average (for  
> each CPU). Memory usage was under 1G.
>
> I would say I need to try more troubleshooting. Maybe there was  
> congestion on the Fast-E, although preliminary analysis indicates 
> there  were no CRC errors, collisions, or packet loss.
>
> The NFS machine was completely idle.
>
> Last, we repeated the test over a 1 hour period. This time, Monitor 
> was  recording on local drives and we were copying files every 15 
> minutes  with a background process (perl script) to NFS mount point. 
> Everything  worked fine as well.
>
> I don't know if these tests are conclusive yet. However, from the  
> results so far, I would recommend staying away from recording to NFS  
> mounted point. I will continue running simulations to see if anything  
> else can be identified.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel