>>> Andrew Kohlsmith wrote: >>>>>I would set the "Enterprise Class" bar at five 9's reliability >>>>>(about 5.25 minutes per year of down time) the same >>>>>as a Class 4/5 phone switch. This would require redundant >>>>>design considerations in both hardware and software. >>>> >>> >>> To turn around, let's discuss what we need to focus on to get >>> Asterisk there: >>> >>> Here's a few bullet points, there's certainly a lot more >>> * Linux platform stability - how? >> >> Even more than Linux itself is the x86 platform... I've thought about >> this a bit when considering * boxes for big customers. When one >> actually comes along, I'll have to actually make a decision :-). >>>From where I stand, the best thing to do for smaller customers is give >> them a box with RAID and redundant power supplies, if they can afford >> it. > > You can overcome most of those problems by buying good quality > hardware. If you buy your * server from your local Taiwanese clone > shop, you're asking for trouble. A big, beefy machine from Dell would > be better.
Yeah, but nothing like a nice, big Sun machine. A cluster of Dell machines is reliable, but a midrange Sun box puts them to shame. >> But if I were to have a big customer with deep pockets, I'd really >> like * on a big Sun beast with redundant-everything (i.e. you can hot >> swap any component and there's usually n+1 of everything). The >> problem is that I don't think there's any Solaris support for Digium >> cards, since it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem. > > Nope. No Solaris support, but you might be able to get away with > Linux/Solaris...but then you lose a lot of the hot-swapability. In my > experience, though, the only things I've ever been able to hotswap were > power supplies and hard drives...and thats not software/os dependant. With the big boxes like the 4800, you can hot swap CPUs and memory and such as well. You're right that all that stuff is pretty Solaris-dependent, which is why I wanted to see if I couldn't get Asterisk to run on a little Solaris machine (and then sell it to people who own the big ones). >> One of these days, I may convince myself to buy a modern Sun box >> (maybe the ~$1000 Blade 100s) and see what can be done. The only >> problem I could conceive would be endian-ness, but I read about Digium >> cards in a PowerPC box, so that won't be a problem, right? >> Nick > > Endian-ness is really only a driver issue. Its when programmers who > believe that the world revolves around Linux/i386 that you have > problems. But it can also be a problem if you have on-card firmware, I've heard. > Personally, I'd stick my Digium cards into an Alpha of some sort. A > DS-10L for 1U mounting with 1 card or a DS-20 for multiple cards where > you need lots of processor zoobs. I like the Alphas too, but they're being discontinued last I heard, and being replaced with the Itanium. Even VMS is being ported (now _there's_ an OS for * :-) Nick _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
