Forgot to add the most important part regarding Simple DNS. They have
an add-on monitoring piece that will switch DNS records automatically,
and this can be used to automatically switch over to the backup.
Matt
Matt wrote:
Rob,
As far as DNS goes, the best way to do this is to use Simple DNS Plus
with a server in a second location. Simple DNS does full server
replication instead of individual secondaries, and if you have a lot
of domains, it is nice to just manage one installation. If you have a
smaller number of zones, it is easy to just set up secondaries with
any software. I don't generally recommend large DNS services because
they have been attacked and brought down, and that would be a single
point of failure even though the providers claim to be immune from
such attacks. Look up the "Blue Security" for one such example. This
attack also brought down some of Tucow's systems for over 12 hours,
including their E-mail hosting/filtering service.
My company just started with VMware's hosting provider program to
provide legitimate hosting on VMware ESX (virtual servers). VMware is
an enterprise solution unlike most of the others on the market, and
they have a lot of very nice features and add-ons for fail-over and
replication. If you have multiple servers that could be placed on a
big VMware server, you could save a lot of money by going with this
approach since the hardware costs are greatly reduced. Administration
is also simplified, and restoration or moving of the guest operating
systems is a breeze. VMware is the future.
As far as regional redundancy goes, you would be best off by moving
way outside of Chicago. You likely won't get much more in terms of
redundancy by going to Milwaukee than you would by going to another
colo in Chicago. You want to be on a different power grid, and you
want to be on a completely separate provider's network. If something
is big enough to affect all of Chicago, it is big enough to affect
Milwakee too.
If you are in need of some assistance, feel free to give me a call at
(888) 862-9042 x3. My company does do colocation and many other
custom solutions for those that prefer choosing experience, knowledge
and capabilities over branding and value. In the very least, advice
is always free, and it sounds like there are many avenues for you to
explore.
Matt
Robert Grosshandler wrote:
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
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