VoIP Blog

Why Windows OS is a good choice for VoIP?

Apr 17 2012

OS For VoIP server

In the VoIP industry the most common Operating System these days is Linux, mostly for the following reasons:

VoIP administrators can work with command lines, not only on fancy user interfaces with mouse clicks
Asterisk has a huge market share which is running only over linux without hacks
Windows OS costs
People are afraid of Windows because of security issues

Let me refute all these points:

Regarding system administration:
The Mizu VoIP server comes with a comfortable centralized user interface where you can manage all the services from a single graphical user interface. If you like the command line, you can use the built-in "Server Console".

Regarding Asterisk:
This is tricky because although Asterisk is free and open source, you will have better ROI with the Mizu Softswitch. The explanation is very simple for this:
-for small instances you will have a lot of benefits because of the easy management and configurations, so you don't have to spend days fine-tuning your asterisk config files and checking the logs to achieve the same stability as the Mizu Server offers by default
-for large instances you will save a lot of money on hardware: a typical Asterisk instance can handle only 500 simultaneous calls, while a Mizu server can handle 5000 which is a 10X increase (and decrease in your hardware costs)
-for very large instances you can easily setup the mizu SIP load balancer to handle millions of users and millions of simultaneous calls, while with Asterisk/Linux the same setup will require a lot of experience, work-time, special software/hardware and careful planning

Regarding the OS costs:
All you need for VoIP is the Web Edition. Standard or Enterprise editions will not add any benefit when used as a VoIP server.
The Windows Server 2008 Web Edition total cost is $300 (USD) or around $5/month if rented, depending on your hosting provider.
Running the Mizu Softswitch, you can handle 5000 simultaneous calls and one million users with this.
Let's agree that the OS price will be near 0% from your total investment when you start a VoIP business.

Regarding security issues:
Although you can see windows security issues every week in the news, those will be not applicable when you use the OS for VoIP.
We can split the security issues in 2 parts:
1. related to the windows core, kernel and IP layer
2. related to high level services (IIS, other applications)

99 percent of the security issues are related to the second category which you should not bother about, because when you are using Mizu Softswitch, all windows services are turned off and/or firewalled. Even for the web interface we are using our own built-in web-service and not the windows web server (IIS). We haven't met any OS specific security issue in the last 10 years managing around 200 VoIP servers.
The 1% of the bugs/security issues related to the IP layer makes the whole box vulnerable, but those are very rare and Linux has around the same number of bugs. So there is nothing to do with this except to let the windows updater do its work.

Conclusion:
Your VoIP box will be as safe as your VoIP software is. And this is vendor dependent and not an OS dependent thing.

Due to the secure modular architecture of the Mizu Softswitch, it is less vulnerable for security issues then similar open source VoIP software solutions.

The most frequent issue with VoIP servers remains to be various DDoS and account scanning attacks, so you should make sure that you have a working protection for this and not care about the OS so much.

Read more about Mizu VoIP sercurity