UPDATE:

September 27, 2005 - I have finished my performance testing of the new TE405P with second generation firmware and it is significantly better than generation one and even slightly better performing than the current Sangoma a104 board when using RBS spans. See the full review here:
Digium 405P v2 Review

August 31, 2005 - I have finally received my test TE406P Digium card today and plan on running some new tests this week on it and then I will test the TE405P with the v2 firmware the week after that. I also have installed some new Sangoma Driver software that offers some more enhancements over previous versions. There is also potentially another option out there, Next month I should also be receiving a new TDMoE quad T1 bridge appliance that moves the channel switching to a separate appliance supposedly reducing load and allowing for easy redundancy setups.



In July 2005 Digium released new firmware for its dual and quad-port T1/E1 cards, which it claims provides 67% better performance going sip->pstn. So this whole test is pretty much moot at this point.

---

May 2005 Quad T1 Card Tests

In May 2005 we wanted to test the real-world performance of the Digium TE405P Quad T1/E1 card(v1 firmware) against the Sangoma A104 Quad T1/E1. The results and specifications of this test in production are below.

We hope to update this page as Digium and Sangoma release new cards and drivers to see if the performance changes. Also, we would love to get test quad cards from other manufacturers like Aculab, Eicon or Varion as they become available to us.

Here is a summary of the production environment that these servers were evaluated in and the hardware used.

HARDWARE:
Each server was constructed in house with the following components:
- 4U rackmount server chassis
- Asus P5AD2 motherboard
- Intel P4 3.2GHz Prescott processor socket 775 with 1 MB L2 cache
- 2GB Kingston DDR2-533 RAM
- 3 x 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA 7200RPM hard drives
- Enermax 550W power supply

SOFTWARE:
- Slackware 10.1 with custom kernel 2.4.29
- Asterisk 1.0.6
  the configurations in zaptel.conf, zapata.conf and extensions.conf were the same
- astGUIclient suite
Note: Sangoma machine uses wanpipe-beta8a-2.3.3 drivers

The cards compared are the Digium TE405P in T1 mode(v1 firmware) and the Sangoma A104(v11 firmware).

Each server is setup the same with 3 telco T1s connected(one of them connected on the other end to another Asterisk server) and a channelbank connected to the fourth T1 port.

The live application used to evaluate performance and gather the stats is the astGUIclient package with VICIDIAL for outbound dialing. http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/

Here are links to screenshots of our performance monitoring web pages for each server:
http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/VDreports/performance_Digium_TE405P.gif
http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/VDreports/performance_Sangoma_A104.gif


The data was gathered every 5 seconds from both servers.

You can see that even though the Sangoma server ran at slightly higher call capacity(11% more calls with 4% more talk time), that it still had a significantly lower average load(27% lower) and peak load(56% lower). The periodic tests that we have done over the last month confirmed these results, that all things being equal, the Sangoma server performed 30-50% more efficiently at doing the same job.

I am currently awaiting a beta test version of the Digium TE406P card(with the echo-canceller daughterboard) and I am awaiting word from Sangoma on testing their newly announced A104d card(with on-board echo-canceller) to see how they both fare in our real-world tests.

For more information contact us at: astguiclient -at eflo -dot net

See also

Sangoma