Geographically distant load balancing (er, I mean failover)

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Dan Brown wrote:

> Well, the bureaucrats here seem to have this nagging doubt about dumpster
> fires.  There was a hosting company in town who had four separate ISP lines
> all coming in off the same poll behind their building.

great planning.

> One day the dumpster
> behind the building, right beside the poll, caught fire (cigarette probably)
> and took out all four connections at once and subsequently they were down
> for about two weeks before they regained connectivity.  During that time
> they lost 80%-90% of their clients and went out of business shortly
> thereafter.

they'll be back, doing the same thing elsewhere

> Failover, as far as I am concerned, could have a lag as long as five minutes
> although this would probably not be acceptable in the middle of the day.
> Our local LVS takes over a minute from failover reaction to the takeover of
> every last IP.  We create/run websites, they aren't critical and they don't
> save lives.  I'd prefer to have colocation within the same city but as it
> happens the nearest colocation facility (provided by the ISP itself) happens
> to be 650km (+400mi.) away.

you'll need the routing info (eg via BGP) to do the failover 
and you'll have to get it from the ISP.

If the ISP owns both facilities, why aren't they offering 
routing failover (for $) themselves?

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
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