06-04-08 | Blog Post
When businesses depend on the Internet to generate revenue and maximize profits, it is highly important their computers are always on and always connected to the Internet. Simply put, these are today’s uptime standards. That is the benefit of Online Tech’s High Availability (HA) rack. The high availability rack at Online Tech a Michigan data center and managed service provider, provides the redundancy to maintain always on and always connected computers. The design of the high availability rack is what provides this redundancy.
There are two particular design components that provide the necessary redundancy for the high availability rack: power distribution and network distribution.
Power for the high availability rack is distributed from two diverse power feeds. Each feed is fed through a UPS (Universal Power Supply), which cleans and distributes the power going to the high availability rack. Each PDU is connected to a pool of redundant batteries or an N+1 pool. The power to the HA rack is connected to two power strips. The entire power distribution also contains backup generators. In the event of a power failure, the PDU sends a signal to the generators to kick on and provide the necessary power to the HA rack.
Network connections to the high availability rack at Online Tech offer the same redundancy as the power distribution. Two core routers are fed by multiple ISPs (Internet Service Providers). And each network feed is crossed between both routers and Online Technologies’’ network access switches. This provides two different points of network access. The network feed is then connected to two Universal Threat Management devices. These devices provide redundant firewall and denial of service, among other threat management applications. The network connections are then dispersed to all servers contained within the high availability rack through the network switches.
The benefit of this design is that it inherently creates no single point of failure for both power and network.
Businesses that rely on e-commerce cannot afford to be offline. A high availability rack through Online Tech provides the peace-of-mind of knowing computers are always on and always connected to the Internet.
