I recently wrote a post about network disaster preparedness and provided some tips on how to avoid network outages. I came across a great blog post that added more depth to the topic by discussing how to avoid the most common culprits for single points of failure on small to midsize networks. The post was written by Derek Schauland from TechReuplic and he highlights some network areas that I agree need particular attention.
1. Network Switches – Keeping spare switches online is ideal, but may be cost prohibitive. Consider having a couple of extra switches around in case of a failure.
2. Tape Drives – Ensure you have redundancy in terms of tape drives for back-up and recovery in case of a worst case scenario. You never know when a tape drive may stop working.
3. Network Interface Cards (NICs) – Use servers with multiple NICS for improved connectivity and for failover in case one of the cards in the server fails.
4. Internet Connections – Having redundant connections can be a critical part of avoiding a single point of failure, especially considering the importance of the Internet to business operations these days. Of course the cost of keeping a connection with two providers active needs to be justifiable for your business. At a base level, it never hurts to have a plan in place to immediately take action to move to a secondary provider if your primary fails.
5. Cabling – I’m adding to Derek’s list here, but cabling issues often cause LAN failures. It’s always worthwhile to have many spare cables of different lengths ready to go. I keep a few really long ones as spares in every telco/IT room. They are great for testing and at times when I need a temporary cable.
This will help you to solve, both the most basic and overlooked issues and the more dramatic ones. This list is not all inclusive, but these fives areas should be considered in planning for a worst case scenario. Do you have any additional areas that you pay particular attention to in your network?
No comments:
Post a Comment