[c-nsp] Solution for 'DR' Site

Andrew Miehs andrew at 2sheds.de
Tue Apr 9 04:03:06 EDT 2013


On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 5:29 PM, Sanjeev Maniks <midoasis at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for your comment.   At the moment the bank is already mirroring the
> data between the primary and DR sites and have now requested that we not
> provide any communication channel through our network for this purpose.  So
> we will in effect be providing the channel for their external clients to
> access their Internet Banking Platform either from the Primary or DR site
> should the former go offline.  The only other service that requires
> external access will be SMTP/POP3.
>

Sanjeev,

I think you have misunderstood me here - this is not something that is
easily answered in a 10 line email.

Are they dealing with the failover of their database servers/ application
servers/ mail servers themselves?  Are you referring to the primary site
loosing Internet connectivity, or are you referring to it going offline,
and failover servers over to the DR? Who is responsible for this failover?
How do you know when to failover? How do you fail back? Is this done
manually or automatically? Do you have firewalls? How much of the entire
process are you providing a quote for ( the entire IP failover, or only
until their firewalls?) Do you need layer 2 or layer 3 connectivity between
the sites? Do you have dark fibre/ DWDM between the sites?

Alone the Internet banking application probably consists of webservers,
application servers, gateways to a mainframe, mainframe, load balancer,
firewall etc..
Where does your handover end? How does their architect expect you to
failover? If your responsibility is ONLY for the Internet network
connection, you would need to clear up with them how they imagine the
failover should happen - routing protocol such as BGP or OSPF, or something
like VRRP/ HSRP...

The only way to answer this would be to go and actually find out what the
customers requirements are, and what he actually wants.


Good luck,

Regards

Andrew


More information about the cisco-nsp mailing list