I was at Astricon in Phoenix Arizona this week. It was a very good conference with approximately 700 attendees. There was certainly no indication that the market share growth of Asterisk is going to slow any time soon. It was clearly evident at this show that Asterisk is still early in its adoption lifecycle, but the product and community are beginning to mature. This is a good thing.
There will always be nostalgia for the good old days of Asterisk and the first Astricon. The first Astriscon was much larger than expected and had all the excitement of a new movement that is catching fire. Those who were there will remember the eager cheering crowd when Mark Spencer announced the release of Asterisk 1.0 and a free IAXy to whomever could post the news on Slashdot.org first. Everyone there felt special because they had the luck or foresight to be on the ground floor of something that was going to be big. And they were right, Asterisk is going to big.
This Astricon was also exciting, but in a different way. If you are an open source purist, you probably were disappointed that the zany, geekiness has been diluted by the growing presence of boring folks. Boring folks who either use Asterisk in their business or are part of the Asterisk ecosystem. I have been an Asterisk fan since 2003, but as a boring person I find the new maturity of Asterisk more exciting than ever. Asterisk's feature set, scalability and reliability continue to improve. It is now competing successfully with the blue chip PBX vendors such as Cisco and Nortel for the small business market.
At Atsricon, I presented our latest performance test results for Asterisk as a B2BUA. We found that Asterisk running on a Dell PowerEdge 840 with a single quad core 2.4 GHz CPU, running Redhat v5.1 can handle 1000 simultaneous calls of G.711 traffic and 320 simultaneous calls with transcoding from G.711 to G.729. The economics of this solution work out to be $1 per port with no transcoding and $13.13 per port for transcoding from G.711 to G.729. We are working on the final document which we will publish to the Asterisk mailing list.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
OpenSER and RTPproxy Performance Test
We have published results from a performance test of OpenSER V1.3 and RTPproxy V1.0 running on the same host server. The purpose of the test was to understand the relationship between server CPU performance and the maximum number of simultaneous calls. The massive scalability of SIP signaling with OpenSER is well known. For this test the critical component being tested was RTPproxy and the proxying of media.
A quick summary of the test results show that RTPproxy running on a single core of a 2.33 GHz Intel Xeon 5140 CPU can manage up to 750 simultaneous calls. If both cores had been used on both Xeon CPUs, we expect that RTPproxy could have managed 3000 simultaneous calls.
For a summary of the performance test, and to download the complete test plan, go to www.transnexus.com/White Papers/OpenSER_RTPproxy_Benchmark_Test.pdf
We are finalizing a new performance test of Asterisk V1.4 used as a B2BUA. We will present our Asterisk performance test results next week at Astricon.
A quick summary of the test results show that RTPproxy running on a single core of a 2.33 GHz Intel Xeon 5140 CPU can manage up to 750 simultaneous calls. If both cores had been used on both Xeon CPUs, we expect that RTPproxy could have managed 3000 simultaneous calls.
For a summary of the performance test, and to download the complete test plan, go to www.transnexus.com/White Papers/OpenSER_RTPproxy_Benchmark_Test.pdf
We are finalizing a new performance test of Asterisk V1.4 used as a B2BUA. We will present our Asterisk performance test results next week at Astricon.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Internet Telephony Expo Update
I have spent the last two days at the Internet Telephony Expo in Los Angeles. It appears that the Internet Telephony Expo has benefited from the demise of the Voice on the Net (VON) show. In a down economy, the number of attendees looks to be up slightly from last year and the number of vendor exhibits appears to have increased.
Yesterday I gave a presentation on Open Source and Open Standards (download presentation). What impressed me most about the audience was how little they knew about VoIP and telecom. I see this as a very positive development as more people from enterprises are being drawn to learn about VoIP. VoIP is now spreading beyond the developers and early adopters. The audience is now people who are looking to solve real world problems, not futurists.
The most popular sessions at the conference have been the sessions on SIP Trunking. The audience at these sessions appeared keen to get the practical insight they need to make decisions on how to replace PRI circuits with SIP trunking services. While I have not heard any buzz about the latest and greatest new innovations, it is nice to see VoIP technology maturing with real and wide spread deployments.
Yesterday I gave a presentation on Open Source and Open Standards (download presentation). What impressed me most about the audience was how little they knew about VoIP and telecom. I see this as a very positive development as more people from enterprises are being drawn to learn about VoIP. VoIP is now spreading beyond the developers and early adopters. The audience is now people who are looking to solve real world problems, not futurists.
The most popular sessions at the conference have been the sessions on SIP Trunking. The audience at these sessions appeared keen to get the practical insight they need to make decisions on how to replace PRI circuits with SIP trunking services. While I have not heard any buzz about the latest and greatest new innovations, it is nice to see VoIP technology maturing with real and wide spread deployments.
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