Aretta Communications - Hosted Asterisk Servers

Asterisk® is a complete IP PBX in software. It runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX including many advanced features that are often associated with high end (and high cost) proprietary PBXs. Asterisk® supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment. For more information, visit: http://www.asterisk.org/about.

Aretta has gone through an extensive analysis of the leading virtualization platforms in the market and has chosen the Virtuozzo virtualization technology from SWsoft (www.swsoft.com). SWsoft Virtuozzo is a patented OS virtualization solution. Virtuozzo creates isolated virtual environments (VE) or containers on a single physical server and OS instance. Compared to other virtualization technologies, Virtuozzo offers the highest levels of density, performance and manageability.

• Intelligent Partitioning - Division of a server into as many as hundreds of VEs with full server functionality.
• Complete Isolation - VEs are secure and have full functional, fault and performance isolation.
• Dynamic Resource Allocation - CPU, memory, network, disk and I/O can be changed without re-booting.
• Live Migration - Business continuity capabilities including live migration ensure data is available and recoverable.
• Mass Management - Suite of tools and templates for automated, multi-VE and multi-server administration.

Virtuozzo’s OS virtualization solution has higher efficiency and manageability, making it the best solution for organizations concerned with containing the IT infrastructure and maximizing resource utilization. Virtuozzo’s complete set of management tools and unique architecture makes it the perfect solution for easily maintaining, monitoring and managing virtualized server resources for consolidation and business continuity configurations.

In the case of Aretta’s communication-centric applications including the Asterisk software IP-PBX, Virtuozzo has proven itself to be the best possible virtualization platform to house such real-time applications.

Aretta has a number of pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-configure distributions of Asterisk without the need of buying, building or maintaining any PC hardware, downloading any distribution, or installing any software.

Aretta applies custom security packages and configurations to its Asterisk Virtual Servers. Some of these include:

• Custom IPTables Firewall
• BFD (Brute Force Detection)
  RKHunter (Rootkit Hunter)
• CHKROOTKIT (Rootkit Checker)
• Force SSH Protocol 2
• Secure /tmp, /var/tmp
• Chirpy’s EXIM Dictionary Attack ACL

Each Asterisk server, be it virtual or dedicated, across the network is monitored for system availability and health. The Aretta Network Operations Center (NOC) is alerted when Asterisk servers fail to respond, or have CPU or disk utilization statistics that exceed pre-programmed thresholds. In addition, every hardware server is managed with SNMP traps, producing NOC alerts when a particular hardware failure occurs (such as a server fan not spinning within the correct RPM range, or a hard disk drive in a RAID array has failed.) Our focus is on proactive monitoring. These custom built monitoring systems allow Aretta system administrators to address issues as soon as possible typically before they can cause problems with end user’s servers.

Aretta has a custom backup system which on a nightly basis, completely backs up each Asterisk server to a network attached storage device. A weekly off-site backup is also performed. This allows quick restoration of an Asterisk server in the event of a hardware failure. We also have the ability to restore nightly backup images or factory default images if an end-user were to somehow corrupt their server installation.

Aretta offers a number of User Management Interfaces to administer your virtual or dedicated Asterisk server. You receive the complete information to access these interfaces in the Welcome Email sent when you sign up for service. These interfaces include: