01-07-2014, 04:00 PM
Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery.docx (Size: 394.37 KB / Downloads: 9)
Abstract
When choosing the necessary bandwidth for your business, there are several factors to consider. Understanding the difference between the speed of transferred data and the amount or number of bytes transferred your business requires helps to make this decision easier. But what happens in the event allotted bandwidth usage is exceeded? Online Tech offers solutions for when bandwidth is exceeded, through the 95 th percentile calculation. There is also an option to prevent overages entirely
Introduction
This document provides an overview of “Internet bandwidth” service. Internet bandwidth is the amount of data transferred between (to and from) the Internet and Online Tech’s private network. The service described does not represent the bandwidth used internally to Online Tech’s network. For the purposes of this document, “bandwidth” is meant to imply “Internet bandwidth
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Contracted vs. Overages
There are two forms of bandwidth fees: Contracted and Overages.
Contracted traffic is the amount of bandwidth or transfer your company commits to fund every month regardless of the amount used. It’s also the amount of bandwidth or transfer Online Tech commits to provide to your company. In essence, Online Tech has an obligation to ensure there is the contracted traffic available to your company, and your company has an obligation to fund that much traffic each month for the term of its contract.
Overage traffic is the amount of traffic your company uses beyond its contracted amount. Overages occur because customers are allowed to use more than their contracted amount. Online
Burstable Bandwidth
Burstable bandwidth is the flexible alternative to dedicated bandwidth, which only provides a fixed amount of maximum throughput. Burstable, on the other hand, allows your company to use additional network capacity beyond the portion it has purchased to handle periods of peak usage. For example, you may have purchased 3.0 Mbs of committed bandwidth but still be able to burst up to 10 Mbs or more depending upon your original sales agreement. If your company bursts excessively beyond its committed bandwidth, which is included in your respective agreement, then your company will incur an overage charge.
In order to define excessive burstable use and whether an overage fee is warranted, Online Tech uses the 95th Percentile as the form of measurement. Based on the 95 th Percentile, then your company is allowed to burst above its guaranteed bandwidth 5.0% of the time during a given month without receiving additional charges as described below
Measuring Bandwidth—95
th Percentile The industry uses a standard of 95th percentile for measuring traffic on shared, colocation, or dedicated server hosting. This enables Online Tech to maintain a network with sufficient capacity and to provide clients with the most accurate reading possible and deliver the defined service level agreement (SLA).
On the first of the month, the Online Tech system generates a report on bandwidth utilization for the previous month. This report is sent to Online Tech’s System Administrators for review. Once the review process is complete, it is sent to the billing department for verification. Clients that exceed their committed amount of bandwidth will be charged for the overage and notified via email or mail.
It is important to understand the calculation method and for you to keep an eye on your company’s bandwidth usage taking place on its server. In some cases, if your server has been compromised or the traffic has spiked—the amount of bandwidth that is being used will exceed your base rate.
The RTG server which monitors and records all bandwidth utilization for the month polls all of the switch ports in 5 minute intervals. From the 1st of the month to the last day of the month this data is stored on the RTG server. On the last day of the month, a final calculation is made. This provides Online Tech with a report of what the 95th percentile usage was for all of its servers. These calculations are used to inform customers of their usage exceeding the amount of bandwidth agreed upon in their contract. If this does occur, a "bandwidth overage" is charged for that exceeded amount.
Power Distribution
As figure 1 displays, the rack is designed to withstand any single point of power failure. The rack is supplied power through two diverse power feeds. The two power feeds from the utility company travel different paths into Online Tech data centers. In the event one feed is disrupted, there is a second feed providing the data center with power. Each power plug is fed into a different power strip. Power strips provide digital readouts, which aid in monitoring power levels, helping to avoid tripping a circuit breaker. The power strips are connected to two different PDUs (Power Distribution Units). And each PDU is connected to a pool of redundant batteries or an N+1 UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) pool, which cleans and distributes the power while providing an additional backup.
The clean power from the UPS is stable; therefore, any fluctuation in power, both power surge and brown out, is regulated by the UPS. So, equipment in Online Tech data centers receive a constant, stable level of power. The entire power feed is wed to two generators.
Generators at Online Tech facilities are either diesel or natural gas. If power is lost, the batteries send a signal to the generators, which will switch on and activate thereafter. This design inherently creates redundancy. In other words, if one point of power distribution should fail, there is a backup. There is no single point of power failure.
Network Distribution
Designed to replicate the same redundancy as the power distribution, the network and Internet connectivity offer no single source of failure. Two core routers are fed from
multiple ISPs (Internet Service Provider). Each ISP feed is cross-meshed between both routers and OT’s network access switches, providing two diverse network paths. The feed is then sent through two universal threat management devices (UTMs), which provide redundant protection to potential threats. The universal threat management devices provide firewall protection, VPN, denial of service, intrusion detection, port scan and load balancing. From the universal threat management devices, the network connection is sent to two rack network switches, which disperse the network connectivity to all servers contained within the rack
Preventative Maintenance and High Availability
If your business relies solely on ecommerce, you cannot afford to be down, not even for preventative maintenance. However, if preventative maintenance is not performed, the risk for a failure increases.
Inevitably, preventative maintenance must be done to your equipment. Therefore, the high availability package at Online Tech is designed to allow you to conduct the necessary preventative maintenance on your equipment, while still maintaining customer access to your site.
With two servers, properly configured, one server can be shut down for preventative maintenance, while customer traffic is maintained by the other server. For example, if you have two network switches in the rack and all your servers are connected to it, you can unplug one server, do preventative maintenance on it, plug it back in then do the same with the other switch. All the time, the servers never go down. That’s high availability
Conclusion
At Online Tech, we offer a high availability solution that guarantees your company’s computing environment is available.
In addition, we offer backup and disaster recovery (DR) options with our HA package. A replicated server is available at an offsite data center such as our Flint Township data center, which resides in a different power grid than our Ann Arbor data centers, providing even more redundancy.
The anatomy of the rack is designed to provide businesses, like yours, that rely on the Internet and their network to drive their business. These businesses cannot afford to be offline. Therefore, a High Availability package with Online Tech provides the peace-of-mind to know your business will be always on and always connected to the Internet.