We are in the process of building a new secure web application for our company, and are looking at options for ensuring redundancy in our data center. We don't have a lot of money, but have relatively high bandwidth requirements, so have considered a 50/20 FiOS Business connection with a T1 backup, which would cost ~$600/month total. In comparison, a 15Mbps partial T3 costs $2500/month in our area.
If we were to go with this set up, is there a way for someone typing in our address to automatically be redirected to the other line if the FiOS is down? Since it's an SSL connection, we'd need to ensure that the certificate would work either way as well.
Update - to those suggesting an outside data center solution, we have relatively high internal user bandwidth requirements (~80Mbps). Purchasing an 80Mbps pipe to a colocation facility, to which we'd also have to pay high monthly fees, isn't really financially feasible. In our area, such a setup would cost around $10,000/month.
To expand and put together two ideas previously mentioned: you could use a multi-wan router which would have failover and purchase DNS hosting service with load balance/failover feature which will automatically switch your A records when your Verizon line or your T1 line goes down. This would mean you need to configure your server for both IPs and test them every time you make a significant change.
If you want to simplify it, I would recommend colocating in a datacenter which offers a good BGP mix of providers, and buy bandwidth from them, which will make everything much simpler.
To me, using words like "data center" and "FIOS / T1" in the same sentence is nonsensical. The term "data center", in my mind, conjures images of server rooms with ample bandwidth coming in from one or more sources.
With that said, if said application is of such importance, perhaps it should be hosted in a cloud based solution -- or at least externally? In a cloud scenario, the redundancy is built in, so you don't have to worry if one or more links go down...
And depending on which provider you would choose, it may be cheaper to host the site outside rather than try to bring in the bandwidth / redundancy you desire.
Though, I can only speculate about this as we do not know more details about the implementation -- where the data lives vs. the application, etc.
You have two choices.
Basic: set up the relevant DNS records with short TTL. Find a way to update them with the T1's IP addresses should your FIOS line go down.
Advanced: get an AS and your own IP block. Install routers in front of your network, configure them to run BGP.
If you don't want to use both uplinks simultaneously, I'd say the first option is totally fine.
The real solution, IMHO, is to put a server somewhere reliable. A previous poster is essentially correct: the only way to get true redundancy is to get your own IP block and do your own routing, which a Verizon FIOS connection will not let you do.
You can either rent a server from someone who's willing to do this for you, or buy a server and stick it somewhere that will provide this for you. The other option is to set a low Time to Live (TTL) on your DNS records (maybe 5 mins?) and then change the DNS records when one line goes down, and back when it comes up.
Like most people have said, the real solution is colocation. However, as an option because of your high local bandwidth requirements, in many places, you can do point to point metro ethernet. This would let you go from your office to a data center and be much cheaper than paying for external bandwidth at the data center. Most of the big players offer it (AT&T, Verizon, etc) and if nothing else it’s at least worth getting pricing on, even if you're not interested.
I’m also thinking you could pay for hosting somewhere and have extra URLs set up. ie. www.yoursite.com, www2.yoursite.com (fios), www3.yoursite.com (backup T1). When external clients go to www.yoursite.com, you would have an app on your remote hosting site check if www2 was up. If so, then redirect clients to www2. If not, redirect clients to www3. This would only really work for new connections and people who don't bookmark the www2 or www3 and would be subject to latency, and a million other ifs that makes this a bad solution, although a potentially workable one.
they make multi-WAN routers. can you use one of those?
Ok, so as i'm reading this, you've got an office, which houses your staff, and a server (or 2+). Your staff are used to being able to access your servers quickly, and want to keep it that way, but to eliminate your single point of failure, you need another server.
You could spend a fortune on getting this working in your office, get a transit provider to give you a leased line. Trust me, there's no point doing this over "FiOS" or a jumped-up ADSL line. I don't know whether your FiOS quote is contended bandwidth, but you're unlikely to get anywhere near 50Mbit.
Look closely at your application layer data. Can you optimise it for WAN transmission? Gzip everything you can, and install a reverse-proxy to cache as much data as possible. Also shift all the external media, Images, CSS and javascript type stuff to a CDN. They can worry about the bandwidth that you can't afford.
It also sounds like you want cheap, good and reliable. You can have any 2 of the three, but not all of them.
If you insist on hosting the servers from your office, you'll need carrier-class IP transit and routing. The connectivity itself might have a high OPEX, but the CAPEX for the routing hardware will be expensive too. You'll need a pair (for true High Availability) of good routers, firewalls, switches to begin with.
If you attempt to optimize your application, you might find that you can get similar performance over diverse WAN links, and are able to shove the entire application onto a cloud environment, such as Amazon's EC2.
The bottom line of the connectivity thing is this: If your application means that much to you, it's worth investing the money in doing it the right way. Cost cutting may seem like a bright idea now, but will come back to bite you in the ass.
Ecassa makes some relatively inexpensive load balance/failover devices. Look like there could be a fit.
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