When looking at establishing a data center, there are several things that you may be looking for. Power, security, and networking are big things that should be on the list, but you also want to look at redundancy. Redundancy means that there are backup components in place to ensure that if a Networking card, power supply, or Ethernet cable fails, your business will not suffer because a source is in place to take over if the primary source fails. Another term used to describe redundancy is high availability, because of the increased availability to your resources. Through the measures deployed internally at Vault Networks we are able to achieve our 99.999% uptime service level agreement (SLA) when these measures are in place.
We have achieved redundancy by ensuring that your server has everything that it needs (including power and network source). So in the case of networking, a redundant connection would include two Ethernet cables going to two separate routers from two separate network cards connecting to our backbone ISP providers. From there, due to the network redundancy provided by our BGP solution, you will be connected to our backbone connection reaching out to 11+ ISPs to allow your server to communicate with the internet. For power, we would provide two power cables leaving your server and going to two separate PDU appliances, both with their own reboot bars. We also have redundancy for cooling as well, monitoring our data center and utilizing additional cooling measures if the temperatures do not meet our standard of excellence.
Redundancy is an excellent best practice to ensure maximum uptime whether you have dedicated or collocated servers. After all, it is possible for a cable to become defective or for a power supply to have a fuse go out. While our technical team is on top of these things when they occur, the best practice is to have a second power supply or Ethernet cable in place, ready to go so that your business never suffers any disruption.
Our vnCloud takes redundancy to another level – we have multiple cloud infrastructures in place so that if the infrastructure you are on has an issue, you will cross over to a new one seamlessly. vnCloud servers are a great way to provide redundancy for the servers that you have in your infrastructure, by turning them on when your servers are down for maintenance or other reasons. So an absolute best practice would be to have your server setup with redundancy for networking and power, with a backup server in the cloud ready to go in the event that it is needed.
Vault Networks has data centers built to provide the highest availability possible. Find out more information about our Colocation, Dedicated and Cloud server solutions by contacting us at sales@vaultnetworks.com, or calling us at (305) 735-8098 option 2.