Normally when a phrase contains the word "Failure" you would try to avoid it at all costs, it simply how we are wired. The same is true when planning your network design and architecture. A common question we all face is - How can we minimize downtime? Well, the best way to avoid downtime is by removing “Single Point of Failures”.
Let’s think of your business network as an urban city’s roads and traffic. Imagine if there was a single main road entering and exiting the city, this becomes a bottleneck and can easily cause congestion, furthermore if there was an incident that temporarily shut the road down, the city’s traffic would come to a standstill.
Your business network works in the same manner. Unplanned failures can cause a major disruption across the network if the design relies on a single component. In the event that this device or link fails, the entire network will suffer an outage. With the advancement of technology, there are many choices and designs which achieve superior results and stay within your budget. We pride ourselves in finding the balance between the two largest factors, Value vs. Cost.
High Availability (HA)
High Availability (HA) is a feature we like to implement in firewalls and network devices, deploying them in pairs of two. They synchronize their configurations, and a constant heartbeat channel is monitored between the pair. In the event of a failure, the remaining device will man up, and carry the load.
Dual ISP (Internet Service Provider).
Ask yourself this question - Can you afford an hour of downtime? If there is an outage with your local internet provider, it can take hours for them to dispatch a technician and resolve the issue. A common solution is to safely rely on “Dual Internet Providers”. With this design, we can connect your network to two independent internet providers eliminating that risk.
TNS cloud (Hosted Servers).
There is nothing more frustrating than waking up and your server is down. (Ok, no coffee would make it worse!). The good news is, this is completely avoidable with the right planning and consideration. In our data centers, we use clusters of physical servers. In the event of a server failure, the remaining members catch the slack resulting in no impact to the end user, which translates into less emergency panic calls to you. (Time to revisit that vacation to the Bahamas!)
Give us a call at The TNS Group, we can find the perfect balance and create a network design that is tailored to your business network needs.
By Eli Wasserman, Client Services, The TNS Group
Categories: Managed Service Provider
