Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: The Asterisk Advantage

1. Disaster Recovery &Business Continuity: The Asterisk Advantage Dennis Little, ReliAvail I.T. Company

2. Quick Survey • Developers?

3. Quick Survey • Developers? • Deployed SMB? • Deployed Enterprise?

4. Quick Survey • Developers? • Deployed SMB? • Deployed Enterprise? • No idea!?

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6. Presentation Overview • Dennis LittleReliAvailSMI.T. Company MyBusinessTelephone.com@KeyCruncher (.com) • Disaster Recovery:The Asterisk Advantage • Goal: Share, provoke thought & feedback

7. Presentation Overview • Dennis LittleReliAvailSMI.T. Company MyBusinessTelephone.comKeyCruncher.com @KeyCruncher • Disaster Recovery:The Asterisk Advantage • Goal: Share, provoke thought • Business & engineering questions • How VoIP beats traditional telecom • Disaster-tested solutions • Examples, tips & tricks along the way

8. Why believe in Asterisk? IRC: keycruncherKeyCruncher.com dennis@tapestrytech.com • Engineering support for a large, proprietary (Avaya) installation • $458M organization, $40k benevolent care / day • Supporting 2,200+ staff and 3,000+ seniors in PA, MD & DE • Serving 70,000+ families & children per year • A lot of FOSS software underneath…

9. Rewind a bit, first…

10. Disruptive Streak

11. Disruptive Streak

12. Steve Wozniak is asked… Q: What are some of the biggest barriers to innovation today?

13. Steve Wozniak is asked… Q: What are some of the biggest barriers to innovation today? A: Our education system. Innovation!

14. Innovation: HP & the Apple I Hewlett-Packard turned down Steve Wozniak’s working Apple I prototype…

15. Innovation: HP & the Apple I Hewlett-Packard turned down Steve Wozniak’s working Apple I prototype…5 TIMES!

16. Asterisk & VoIP • Innovative

17. Asterisk & VoIP • Innovative • Disruptive • Merriam-Webster®:a : to break apart : ruptureb : to throw into disorder Synonyms: break, fracture, bust

18. Asterisk & VoIP • Innovative • Disruptive • Merriam-Webster®:a : to break apart : ruptureb : to throw into disorder Synonyms: break, fracture, bust • Asterisk & VoIP is disruptive on one hand, helps mitigate risk on the other

19. We Have Some Work Left… • Olle Johansson’s Challenge: • Encrypt Everything: We need to make the cost of listening in as high as possible, by default. • Integrate IPv6 everywhere • Adaptive audio • Federate or die

20. We Have Some Work Left… • Olle Johansson’s Challenge: • Encrypt Everything: We need to make the cost of listening in as high as possible, by default. • Integrate IPv6 everywhere • Adaptive audio • Federate or die • Let’s help each other! Start a dialogue.

21. Past decade+ of telephony • History of paying too much for reliable and available communications • Economy which is driving innovation towards efficiency and cost-savings • More distributed customers & operations

22. Past decade+ of telephony • History of paying too much for reliable and available communications • Economy which is driving innovation towards efficiency and cost-savings • More distributed customers & operations • We need innovative solutions…

23. Is a D.R. Plan Really in Place? • Is it documented? Well documented? • Is it practiced? • Is it living? • Answered “no” anywhere? Work left to do…

24. Trust and Verify • Are you monitoring / alerting today? In levels? • Do you even know when a “disaster” has happened? • Reliability and availability, sure…. • Fraud • Outage

25. Trust and Verify • Alerting • Nagios, Icinga, Cacti, Zenoss, paid tools, etc. • Trending • Visualize abnormalities – we are very visual beings, with bad memories • Weakness: recognize, mitigate, document and follow

26. Design Questions: Before You Start • Capacity?

27. Design Questions: Before You Start • Capacity? • Interfaces (PRI, analog, VoIP-only)?

28. Design Questions: Before You Start • Capacity? • Interfaces (PRI, analog, VoIP-only)? • Life lines?

29. Design Questions: Before You Start • Capacity? • Interfaces (PRI, analog, VoIP-only)? • Life lines? • Remotes? Security? • Acceptable behavior during disaster?

30. Design Questions: Before You Start • Typical disasters

31. Design Questions: Before You Start • Typical disasters

32. Design Questions: Before You Start • Typical disasters

33. Topology Overview

34. Design Questions: Before You Start • Failover / reduced capacity plans? • Your systems and processes • Provider support, certification & testing • Auto or manual failover? • Do eliminated risks justify increased investment?

35. Design Questions: Before You Start • Expected life of the system • 20, 10, 5 years? • Gradual or rip/replace? • Digium VoIP gateways ~$1,300+ • Edgewater Networks 4601 – T1 PRI, MOS syslog ~$1,200+ • Keep questioning/reviewing/adjusting.

36. Fact: • Voice over IP & Asterisk beat traditional telephony, when considering disaster recovery.

37. Asterisk Advantages (D.R. & other): • Deliver / fail anywhere with quality internet access • Agnostic – device, provider • Least-cost provider routes • Eliminated contracts / commitments in some scenarios • Agile – change in minutes vs. hours or days • 1:n wire pair to calls

38. Asterisk Advantages (D.R. & other): • Deliver / fail anywhere with quality internet access • Agnostic – device, provider • Least-cost provider routes • Eliminated contracts / commitments in some scenarios • Agile – change in minutes vs. hours or days • 1:n wire pair to calls • Call clarity • Scalability – up & down! • Self-service • Allows gradual cutover

39. Asterisk Advantages (D.R. & other): • Increased business intelligence that is affordable, makes sense: • Real-time: CDR, MOS, ad tracking

40. Asterisk Advantages (D.R. & other): • Increased business intelligence that is affordable, makes sense: • Real-time: CDR, MOS, ad tracking • Privacy • Awareness – pole vs. packet • Availability, control of privacy • Asterisk 1.8 > SRTP, TLS authentication

41. Asterisk Advantages (D.R. & other): • Increased business intelligence that is affordable, makes sense: • Real-time: CDR, MOS, ad tracking • Privacy • Awareness – pole vs. packet • Availability, control of privacy • Asterisk 1.8 > SRTP, TLS authentication • Dream it. Build it. Afford it.

42. Provider Failover & Redundancy • Commodity internet basis or Service Level Agreement (SLA) • SOHO / SMB appliance – NETGEAR, Barracuda • Vyatta on whitebox (Foxconn) $150 • Squeeze / Gluster last Astricon • Patton.com BODirS

43. Analog and Digital Failover Solutions • Hardware: Digium, Xorcom (analog or digital, USB)

44. Analog and Digital Failover Solutions • Hardware: Digium, Xorcom (analog or digital, USB)

45. VM-based Failover Solutions • Premise-based & Hosted Virtual Machines • Xen, KVM, VMware

46. Provider Failover Solutions • Failover if your environment is not available, at the provider level • Failover at the provider-level, if they are experiencing issues: RespOrg / SMS800

47. Use the Tools Available • Vitelity API – http://apihelp.vitelity.net • Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG)http://iase.disa.mil • Asterisk 12! REST API http://wiki.asterisk.org • Internet Society Deploy360 – IPv6, DNSSEC, etc.

48. Before we wrap up… any questions?

49. A few things to remember… • Security (least-privilege, fail2ban, VoIP best practices, etc.) • Test, test, test • Lean on the work already done: wiki.asterisk.org • http://tinyurl.com/VoIPSecurityReliability

50. Short Review: Disaster Recovery • Design questions & considerations • How Asterisk & VoIP beat traditional telecom / telephony • Solutions • More questions? • Dennis LittleReliAvailSM I.T. CompanyIRC: KeyCrunchersupport@ReliAvail.com(877) 372-6782MyBusinessTelephone.com