Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Creating a Business Continuance Aware Network
In today’s globally connected world, customers, partners and mobile workers need inbound access to data and applications while data centers require redundant paths and immediate fail-over to send that information. Proactive measures, such as server optimization, are needed to ensure the resiliency of a business' underlying network infrastructure to provide near-immediate service recovery for mission-critical applications.
100% Availability for Critical Web-enabled Applications
Achieving high-quality business continuity (BC) in the wake of disasters and Internet connectivity disruptions requires both inbound and outbound considerations. Since web-enabled applications have made Internet and IP-based Wide Area Networks (WANs) enablers for transacting business, keeping your IT infrastructure up and running is central to effective business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning.
Solid IT strategies for business continuity and disaster recovery planning should focus not only on data-replication/protection and application hosting at disaster recovery sites, but also on protecting against disruptions in Internet connectivity. Radware provides holistic BC solutions including server load balancing that meet the varying needs of these environments.
Continuous Access for Data Centers
By fully leveraging multiple data centers with superior
global re-direction, you can ensure continuous Internet access with high-availability WAN connectivity. Radware’s approach to optimizing the delivery of applications over IP networks uses a host of integrated application delivery services including
Fully optimizing globally distributed resources is critical to ensuring effective business continuity and disaster recovery – as well as increasing business productivity and maximizing return on IT infrastructure investment. For multiple data center environments, Radware offers superior global re-direction technology as part of its core Application Delivery solutions. These server optimization solutions ensure no downtime, no lost transactions and deliver the fastest application response times.
Unique Global Re-Direction Capabilities
Radware’s global re-direction provides transparent re-direction between multiple data centers for backup disaster recovery (DR) sites. In many instances, these sites are used as an active site (during normal online operations) in tandem with a main IT facility to capitalize on IT investments. Most DR site solutions are passive, focusing on the replication of data and/or applications between DR and online sites, so that one site can immediately take over in case the other goes down. Another crucial aspect of this seamless fail-over is the mechanism that automatically redirects application-user requests and traffic streams to the back-up site when the main facility goes down (including the automatic detection of this failure). Having an active-active configuration optimizes resources
and ensures business continuity, providing the greatest return on investment (ROI).
Consider the following issues when deciding to integrate global re-direction in a BC solution:
- Do customers, employees and business partners need to be redirected from the failed site to the back-up site in a matter of seconds?
- Is more than one application being hosted at each site?
- Does the back-up site need to be active, operating in tandem with the main facility?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then global re-direction is a required DR capability. It’s needed to address failures, as well as to ensure that users are directed to the site delivering the best user experience in terms of fast response time and transaction continuity. Improved user experience and transparency can be achieved using solutions armed with advanced re-direction methods.
Multi-tier Global Re-Direction
Radware’s multi-tier global re-direction architecture delivers fast user response time and application/transaction persistency to ensure transaction completeness, session consistency and end-user satisfaction. This approach overcomes domain name system (DNS) failures using three re-direction approaches with
AppDirector. By communicating and sharing site information, businesses are ensured that each step of the global re-direction is achieved. Site selection and BC are achieved by assessing
- Reach
- Site selection (based on server load, hops, and latency)
- Re-direction (application re-direction techniques include HTTP, RTSP, Triangulation, SIP, and Client NAT)
DNS Resolution: AppDirector, acting as a DNS server, communicates with the client’s DNS server to determine the site that best answers the client’s request based on load and proximity.
Global Application Re-Direction: AppDirector communicates with the client to determine the best site based on load, persistency and content. AppDirector uses re-direction methods such as Client NAT, DNS, Global Triangulation, HTTP and RTSP to correct inferior site selection made by the DNS server.
Local Server Selection: AppDirector selects the best local server for the client’s request based on persistency content, server load and availability.
Addressing the Risk of Internet and WAN Disruptions
Radware also provides a high-availability network path re-direction solution. Although Internet service providers (ISPs) have made significant strides in providing continuous service in the wake of disasters, outages still occur and are likely to remain a reality, as long as human error, malice, natural disasters, and business rivalry persist. The simplest and most effective approach to dealing with WAN and Internet reliability issues is the concept of
multi-homing, also referred to as Multi-WAN switching.
A multi-homed corporate network uses more than one link and/or service provider to connect to the outside world (i.e., Internet or WAN) or to interconnect between sites. The basic premise is that while little control can be maintained over the continuity of service of a single provider over a single link, introducing diversity through multiple links provisioned over varied physical and logical paths into the Internet can significantly reduce the statistical likelihood of downtime. Although the concept of a back-up link isn’t novel, low-cost, easy–to-deploy technologies like LinkProof are. LinkProof provides
Immediate detection of link failures and automatic fail-over to an available link, so that the transition is transparent to users- Use of varied link types (e.g., T1 Frame Relay combined with ADSL broadband) through a single device to create cost-effective, yet resilient, networks
- Simultaneous utilization of all available links and bandwidth (load balancing), so that connectivity costs aren’t wasted on a “dark” or poorly utilized back-up lines
- No ISP hassles – ISP cooperation is not required as different IP address spaces issued by different providers can be supported
LinkProof’s multi-WAN switches provide a quicker return on investment (ROI) than previous approaches to multi-homing, such as border gateway protocol (BGP). Savings are realized through lower implementation and maintenance costs, as well as through more cost-effective use of available bandwidth, resulting in lower monthly connectivity bills. LinkProof lets you introduce back-up links to support your business continuity strategy. Real-time health checks of all available WAN paths ensure immediate fail-over to a functional link in the case of service outages, so that data, applications and web sites are available 24×7, without compromising the performance of any of the applications delivered over the network.