The world is growing ever more dependent on the internet. Which means the need for an “always-on” connection has never been greater. In this blog, Stream analyses the Leased Line failover options businesses have as they strive for 100% uptime.
Broadband Failover
Going back a decade or so, it was commonplace for businesses to implement a broadband failover to support their Leased Line. Whilst it may not have been the ideal solution in terms of speeds, it allowed businesses to “get by” because there weren’t so many technologies in the office that were dependent on internet connectivity.
With the modern-day office being more bandwidth-hungry, a broadband circuit as a failover may not be suitable. In order to decide if your business needs a more resilient failover connection, you need to evaluate just what your internet is doing. If it’s doing so much that it will quickly drain the bandwidth provided with broadband, this may no longer be the solution for you.
Leased Line failover
On paper, a leased line failover sounds like a great idea. If your circuit goes down you have another one ready and waiting to kick in. However, you need to consider what could make your primary circuit go offline in the first place. An issue in the exchange? A fibre break somewhere along the line? A mass carrier outage?
All of these elements are going to affect the secondary circuit too. So the contingency plan you have in place actually turns into another support ticket to raise!
Carrier Resiliency
When using a network aggregator; you have the option of placing your failover line with a separate network operator which adds to the resiliency. Whilst it still may go back to the same exchange, it boasts extra resilience because it will be on a different network meaning that if one carrier has an outage, this will not affect the other provider. However, as much of the telecom industry shares infrastructure, there is no guarantee that carrier resiliency will be a fail-safe option.
RAO2
RAO2 stands for Resilient Access Option 2. This means that two services that enter the same building, will reach the building via as diverse routes as possible. They will each terminate to a different exchange, and use different routes and ducting to reach the building. Occasionally, there may be “pinch points” where the circuits do “touch” each other, however, customers will be made aware of this to ensure they understand the risks associated.
For a “truly resilient” RAO2 circuit, a business should also have failover LAN equipment such as routers, switches, firewalls etc. to ensure there is no single point of failure anywhere on the network.
How Stream go one step further
We know there is nothing more important in modern-day business than a working internet connection, and with our core network, we have built specific failover SLAs that seamlessly switch your traffic via diverse internet circuits to ensure they terminate in different parts of our network.
Check out more information on our failover services.
For more information or a quote, please give us a call on 01635 884170 or drop an email to sales@stream-networks.co.uk