Gents and the occasional lady: You all are the smartest network folks I interact with. If you'd be so kind as to give me your opinion / suggestions on the following, I'd be forever grateful.
We're trying to increase the level of uptime and redundancy for our service. To that end, we're looking to establish a hot failover site in a location remote from our current colocation facility. We're in Chicago, we're thinking a driveable city on a completely different grid (Milwaukee, probably.) If the entire Midwest gets nuked, nobody is going to be buying much online. We're looking at approaches to achieve that failover automatically. Our budget and technical expertise aren't large (we now can handle BGP internally if we have to, but we don't have any of the necessary infrastructure to do that, and would very much prefer not to invest in that infrastructure.) We rely on our colo facility to provide bandwidth, routing, internal DNS, etc. (they have great bandwidth, routing, seven providers, etc.) but since there are humans involved, they could screw up, too. We rely on Ultradns for external DNS. Once our users actually reach our firewall, we have great redundancy inside our rack. The most promising approach at this time seems to be to use somebody like ultradns or dnsmadeeasy to provide dns failover. That is, they're watching our site, and if we go down, they switch out A records and point traffic to the backup site. If it matters, we run ms sql, mirroring and log shipping. We'd have the mirror db and the witness in the remote location. Thanks for whatever thoughts you can add to this challenge. DNS failover a workable solution? We'll be looking for a colo facility in Milwaukee or Indianapolis with 4U available if somebody wants to point us there. Yours, Rob ========================= www.iGive.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
