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
[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.
---
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.
