Plan Business Continuity, Think Redundancy
Posted on January 4, 2010 |
Telecommunication Business is a service business that required the service keep running to serve the customer need 24×7 without any interruption. Telecommunication operator should find the way to maximize the plan business continuity if they don’t want abandoned by the customer. One way to help plan business continuity is thinking about redundancy. The word redundancy is very familiar if we got into telecommunication, usually the will use N+1 or 2N mechanism.
There are some component that required redundancy, if we implement redundancy to this component it will get the best business continuity for the Telecommunication Operator.
Server
Server redundancy can be done from the hard disk level up to server level. For the hardisk level we can use RAID technology to make it redundant. We also need to make the Ethernet card redundant with bounding mechanism, so if fail in one Ethernet it can serve by another Ethernet card. From the server level redundancy we can use loadbalancer or heartbit mechanism, so if one server go down it will handle by another.
Data com
Data com redundancy is important to applied. From the router, the link etc need to redundant. It make sure the link from one network element to another network element keep in service even there is one link down, it can handle by another link.
Database
From database perspective, we can use RAC(Real Application Cluster) and Data guard for example on the oracle Database. RAC is Active-Active mechanism that can automatically fail over if one node is down, while data guard is Active-standby, that need the DB admin to activate the standby data guard if there is a problem on Primary Data guard.
Application
Application must make sure have a redundancy. It can applied if the design of the application support heartbit and have several node to handle fail over. Usually the redundancy mechanism is depend on the Application architecture.
I hope I can elaborate more detail for above technology in the next post
From the finance and business perspective, the redundancy must be required additional cost for buying extra hardware or extra application feature. So it should be calculate the cost-benefit if a telecommunication operator want to applied redundancy.
