Download this white paper to learn how to avoid network failures and evaluate the options available to ensure high-availability, network uptime and optimal network performance. It also shows you solutions that are affordable, and when deployed, are operationally cost-effective.
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FailoverWhite Paper
OverviewThe Internet has become so pervasive and integral for conducting business and communicating with customers, partners and employees, that network performance, high-availability, and uptime are required for running the day-to-day operations of an organization. Network downtime not only costs money and loss of productivity, it can also adversely affect a company's reputation among customers and partners. For many companies, their entire business strategy depends on how well its network performs.There are many events that can cause a network or site to go down, such as natural disasters, PowerLink ensures that site security attacks, a backhoe cutting a network line, or failing network infrastructure. Few failover and failback occur organizations plan for, and have the budget to implement appropriate network infrastructure automatically and reliably, to ensure their datacenters and remote offices have the protection they need in anticipation of making this functionality disaster.practical and affordable According to market research firm Infonetics, large enterprises typically lose between 2 -16 even for the smallest busi- percent of their annual revenues due to losses associated with network downtime. The more nesses. distributed a company's network is, the more likely it is to suffer service-provider interruptions. According to a recent Infonetics survey, retailers are affected the most, with service providers accounting for more than 30 percent of their downtime costs. Another cause of downtime is human error, which accounts for about one-fifth of the downtime costs. For financial institutions, this percentage jumps to nearly one-third.
FailoverFailover within a communications network is the process of instantly transferring tasks from a failed component to a similar redundant component to avoid disruption and maintain operations. Automated failover is the ability to quickly reroute data automatically from a failed component such as a server or network connection, to a functioning component, and is essential for mission-critical systems.Different components may be configured for either cold standby (requiring human intervention), warm standby (automatic but delayed) or hot standby (automatic) failover. The three critical elements requiring failover configuration are power, network connectivity and server capacity. This white paper describes the different types of failover, the requirements of failover design, and strategies for successful failover implementation.
Device FailoverIn a failover situation, such as a firewall, router, WAN controller, server load balancer, disk drive, web server, etc., data is transferred to the same type of redundant component to ensure there is limited interruption in data flow and operation. If a primary component becomes unavailable because of either failure or scheduled downtime, the secondary component serves as a backup, and takes over for its failed counterpart.
2 Everything You Need to Know About Network FailoverWhite Paper
The capability to switch automatically to a redundant or standby system, or network upon failure happens without human intervention (see Failover Heirarchy for other types of failover). Automated failover is essential in servers, systems or networks requiring continuous availability, and a high degree of reliability - those that are responsible for mission-critical processes and data (see examples below).
Failover HierarchyAs mentioned earlier, there are different types of failover, some that are not entirely automatic by intention and require manual intervention. This is called "automated with manual approval"-activity is automatic once approval is given. When hardware is on "cold standby", failover must be performed manually, which invites error. In contrast, where hardware is on "warm standby", the backup system runs in the background, so the transfer takes place automatically. The data on both systems is automatically synchronized. To the user, failover resembles a very fast automatic service reboot. However, the current transaction may be aborted because it was not possible to synchronize the data prior to failure. The most reliable failover scenario is "hot standby", where both systems permanently run in parallel - data on both systems is 100% synchronized at all ... [download for more]
