By Kirk Drake | October 5, 2013

How can you evaluate your Datacom Redundancy?

If you are a small business or Credit Union with fewer than 5 or 10 employees than I would not be too worried about your datacom redundancy  If you have a business that requires you to be able to have access to your technology or applications in order to meet your customer or member service initiatives than this blog is for you.

In general there is a direct correlation between the level of redundancy and cost. The more redundancy you would like the more expensive and complex the solution. Often times we are asked to help our clients evaluate the redundancy of their datacom environment, both voice and data, to make sure they are prepared for a variety of issues. If you are running on a single node network and your connection (T1, MPLS, EVPLS, DSL, Cable Modem, FIOS, or something else) goes down it can ruin your day and kill your office productivity. However, adding redundancy isn’t as simple as just ordering another circuit from a different company.

Central Office

The CO or Central Office in telecom lingo is the local building where all the telecom connections run through before being back hauled to another facility. Think of a hub and spoke system here. Since most of the local loop provisioning happens out of the central office and because of our nations telecom infrastructure – multiple carriers or providers will provision circuits out of the same central office. So even if your circuit is provided by a different carrier it can be running on the same wires and infrastructure. Ultimately this leads to paying for something that accomplishes nothing. In order to truly get redundancy at the local loop level you will need to establish connectivity out a second central office.

Building Entry Diversity

Even if you are able to establish connectivity from two separate central offices and two separate carriers, you will than need to make sure your circuits are brought into your building through two separate entrances and conduits. Otherwise you could have a backhoe cut the single path in and eliminate the exact type of event you are trying to avoid. In a perfect world you will provision the circuits internally out of different dmarcs or phone closets. The more diverse the paths from each other the better.

Backup Circuit Challenges

If you have separate central offices and diverse points of entry into the building, it would also be ideal to have different types of technologies. For example, having a T1/DS3 on copper from one provider and a fiber/DSL/or Cable connection from another enables you to have as many options available as possible. The best case scenario in our opinion is to have internet or DIA delivered via copper from one CO in one path and Fiber delivered from a separate CO on the other diverse path.

Physical Equipment Redundancy

Once you have identified the diversity from a physical infrastructure perspective – it than becomes key to have redundancy built into your telecom firewalls and routers. That means you will need a couple of each piece of equipment with redundant switches and cabling to make sure that if one component fails, everything stays on while you fix the problem. In addition, you will probably need some advanced network engineering to configure your routers/firewalls/switches to securely and automatically fail over between the circuits. Ideally, you should send some portion of traffic over both connections at all times and install monitoring and alerting software to make sure you know when something breaks. The only real way to know if something is working is to always be using it!

Testing

Finally, make sure you design a test scenario and schedule and validate that you can shut off key equipment and components and that everything fails over appropriately. Be prepared to retest whenever you make a major routing or firewall rule change.

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