As small-to-medium size enterprises (SMEs) increase their network traffic to support their customers, partners and internal/external employees, they are implementing solutions for disaster recovery to protect their organizations. They are protecting their IT assets by replicating data within specialized storage systems, and protecting voice communications with new server technology and other telephony infrastructure. However, they are now finding that without network failover and load balancing for reliable Internet traffic, their disaster recovery efforts are incomplete.
Just as for every Fortune 100 enterprise, there are tens of thousands of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs); large scale disasters occur very rarely, (but certainly must to be taken into account), while small service provider outages occur regularly, costing businesses millions of dollars, and lost productivity each year.
Deploying multiple ISPs for purposes of disaster recovery allows a company to continue doing business without interruption, even during a service provider outage. There are many deployment options available using multiple ISPs. For example, you can allocate different ISP connections to different applications. Using this technique, you can set up concurrent voice traffic and large file transfers, each dedicated to a separate ISP. This way, large file transfers over an ISP connection will not slow down voice traffic. Using multiple ISPs allows you to segregate voice and file transfer traffic to specific ISPs. If one of the ISPs has a network outage, both the voice and large file transfers will be automatically directed over to the working ISP connection. Once the other ISP comes back online, the traffic will be automatically directed back to the original dedicated configuration.
By automating Internet load balancing among multiple ISP connections, traffic load is analyzed and routed to the ISP connection most able to handle the traffic at that particular point in time. This form of ‘always-on’ network resiliency delivers a great return on investment (ROI). Not only can you ensure network uptime, but you can also lower bandwidth costs by having the flexibility to choose lower cost network connections.
"Implementing disaster recovery for network connectivity using multiple ISPs is cost-effective insurance," said Ron Thomas, president and CEO of Ecessa, a long-time provider of affordable WAN link controllers. “Unfortunately, many SMEs don’t address WAN uptime until their service provider has an outage and they lose productivity, data and even business. Unless an experienced IT manager has encountered a service provider outage, they don’t recognize the need to mitigate against the risk of network downtime to protect their business. They should view network uptime as a form of risk management. However, it is not a high-priority until their network goes down, and their business is adversely affected.”
Network multi-homing is the ability to connect your organization to the Internet with more than one connection. These network connections can be any combination of DSL, cable, fiber, wireless, T-1, T-3, or any other connection type. IT personnel typically deploy multiple network connections based upon three primary criteria: network redundancy, traffic load balancing, and improving network performance. Your organization may be multi-homed to a single service provider using multiple Internet connections to gain link redundancy. However, this is limited redundancy, and may be subject to a network failure if that service provider has an outage. ISP redundancy offers more reliable network redundancy, as well as the ability to load balance, enable quality of service, and improve network performance by connecting your site to more than one service provider, and automatically load balancing and failing over traffic.
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