With the advancement of technology, new trend is to use Active-Active resiliency in place of traditional Active –Standby based resiliency mechanism
BANGALORE, INDIA: From past many decades tremendous development has been happening in the IT industry.
Increase in the business needs, use of multiple applications such as data, voice, video, IP, surveillance etc have led to inventions and upgrade in technologies.
In today’s scenario CIOs are keenly looking at important aspects of IT, such as converged fully manageable secured networks. Centralizing the resources in data center, near disaster recovery center requirement, far end disaster recovery center requirement, virtualization, public cloud and private cloud are the important aspects in data center which they are deeply analyzing for their organizational needs.
For their organizational needs with nearly 'Zero' downtime and uptime requirement and intern commitments for 99.999 per cent (Five nines) is critical, they are looking at networks which are robust, highly available, resilient and support fast failover.
Today, network and application uptime is very critical for existing businesses and thick bandwidth supporting equipments on LAN, WAN and core are for data center.
Network Resiliency
Network resiliency plays a vital role in ensuring efficient operation of services running over network. In video surveillance networks, high resiliency should be very well considered, as network failure in video surveillance for even seconds can cost very high on security objective.
Traditionally, Layer 2 path redundancy in the form of STP is often accompanied by Layer 3 device redundancy in the form of a virtual gateway were provisioned to achieve network resiliency as explained below.
But with this approach, there were disadvantages such as:
•The VRRP standby router is greatly under-utilized, while it is in standby mode
• STP puts many network links into a standby mode, so fails to utilize a significant amount of
available network bandwidth.
With the advancement of technology, new trend is to use Active-Active resiliency in place of traditional Active –Standby based resiliency mechanism. The advantages of Active-Active resiliency over traditional Active –Standby resiliency is described below.
Resiliency in this network is delivered by the virtual chassis and the multiple links:
• Edge switches have dual connections to the virtual chassis. This provides resiliency in the case of broken links or failed ports.
• Each link from an edge switch connects to different virtual chassis members. This provides resiliency in the case of core switch failure.
Executive summary:
The Virtual stacking of the Switches at the Core layer in Data Center enhances and significantly improves the network High Availability and it also allows the customer to utilize the complete/ redundant bandwidth to the optimum.
This strongly justifies the customer return of investment through virtual stacking technology implementation.
The author is country manager, India & SAARC at Allied Telesis.
