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CONSOLIDATION - Another string to your bow
Network Resilience promotes peace of mind for business of any shape or size according to Piers Daniell
With businesses becoming increasingly reliant on telecom communication it is surprising how many companies rely on a single voice and Internet solution without a backup in place. Consolidation has been a buzz word in the IT industry for the past few years, but a consolidated communications network creates a big risk for business in the form of a huge single point of failure.
Historically, network service levels have been managed by availability, but today poor performance can be equally or more damaging as no service at all. To remain competitive, networked application performance must meet the needs of the business and its end-users. It is now widely accepted that service provision and receipt should be governed by an agreement – the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is essential to define the parameters of the service, for the benefit of both the provider and the recipient and it is crucial in setting the expectations of all parties as to what service can be relied upon and what the results of failure will be. Of course, once the expectations and the agreement have been set, it is essential that the terms are adhered to by all parties. This is not always easy to achieve.
With BT currently suffering widespread and well-documented resource issues it is regularly failing to meet its SLAs. This can mean that businesses are putting their future at risk by losing their Internet or voice services for, sometimes, extended periods of time. It is critical that they evaluate the costs to the business of such service losses and seek to protect those services to a relevant and appropriate level. Obviously, if the business relies totally on the availability of its telecoms infrastructure then greater weight will be given to this equipment and the steps taken to protect those services will be rigorous.
However, few businesses, in reality, have actually looked in detail at the response they would get from their ISP should the worst happen. And, they need to ask the crucial question “what compensation will we actually receive?”. No telecom service would recompense against the true loss of business and the majority would only look to reimburse the customer for a percentage of their monthly service rental. This equates to a pitiful amount when compared to the lost business if a company loses e-mail, Internet or voice, even for the smallest of companies.
The answer may well lie in a philosophy that has saved many a shrewd businessman from disaster – the idea that spreading the risk reduces the exposure. In this instance, this means putting additional measures in place to limit the impact of a single source problem, and companies should consider this to protect against service outages. By purchasing, for example, a smaller Internet connection from a different provider, they protect against a technical problem with the main connection. For larger businesses this is a common solution but for the smaller companies the cost implications or the requirement for additional hardware and network configuration demands can often prevent them from making this provision. This is where the cost equation comes into play and should be carefully considered before further infrastructure investment is declined.
Outages can be caused by so many factors that no matter how reliable your connectivity, single points of failure are just too risky and need to be eliminated. Increased resilience and backup will already be in place on the ISP's core network. However, that is only a small part of the overall solution when an Internet connection is provided. The copper in the ground for the service line is most likely owned and operated by BT, which runs to a local telephone exchange where voice and Internet traffic is routed to the major data centres across the country. This 'last mile' suffers from a multitude of potential problems that could take out the vital link for a business and its customers. And these problems may be as simple as road workers cutting through cables as they dig up a road to lay new pipes. Although this is an easy mistake to make and one that occurs on a fairly regular basis, it can cause immense problems and take a good deal of time to rectify. The simplicity of the mistake is no consolation to the companies that are affected by such an outage.
Then there are the more technology driven problems. For example, LLU SDSL providers are reporting an increasing problem with users being unceremoniously disconnected by BT engineers unfamiliar with the technology. SDSL operates over a data-only circuit with a true symmetrical dataflow. However this means the copper cannot be used for voice, as is the case with ADSL, and so there is no dial tone on the line. The dial tone is used by engineers to tell if a line has been properly connected and is in use. Without a dial tone engineers might accidentally reuse the copper when cabling a new circuit in the local exchange.
Aside from careless engineers, major outages can cause longer periods of downtime no matter how much care is taken or engineering resource is available. From rats chewing through cables and allowing water onto the copper, to lightning strikes or power surges, faults are difficult to troubleshoot and timely to fix. Businesses should therefore ensure proper procedures are in place and alternative connectivity has been sourced to maintain communications.
Network resilience and connection redundancy are essential. At the very least businesses should look to purchase two different kinds of Internet connections from their supplier so that, should one line or technology have an issue, the business will be able to continue to operate using the other. Also by taking this secondary service from the ISP it is possible to request that both the primary and secondary circuit utilise the same network settings hence making it easier for anyone to switch connections as no further network configuration would be required. There are also systems on the market from companies such as Cisco that have the capability to include two routers in one case, making the switch over from primary to secondary lines pretty much seamless. Many customers who do consider backup stick with the industry standard of ISDN, however with per second billing the service can prove costly should it be used a lot. Also ISDN only offers 64Kb/s of data transfer, which is a very small amount compared to the 20,000Kb/s offered by some ISPs' ADSL services. But with the advent of DSL technology in the UK there has been quite a bit of investment into the technology and now businesses have a number of options when considering backup.
SDSL, which offers symmetrical data connections, has proved popular as primary connections with the SME market but also as a secondary backup to a larger company's leased line service. Moving down the scale, ADSL offers great backup for businesses invested in SDSL and can be used in the aforementioned Cisco routers. When looking to back up an ADSL circuit this is best achieved by actually choosing a second ADSL circuit, but also by making the following provisions. Ensure that the second ADSL line is activated over a totally different phone line within the building. This is because normal phone cable carries three phone lines and hence, if a cable has a fault, it can affect a number of lines. Secondly try to get the second line activated over a different ADSL technology, which will be using a different part of the exchange. Over the past few years telecom carriers have been upgrading BT's exchanges with their own ADSL technology which has been know as Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) providing alternative connectivity options.
Although the concept of bonding or aggregation has been with us for some years now, it is only recently that some service providers have developed state-of-the-art aggregation technology which makes it possible to provide customers with a connection bonded using multiple lines from different providers and even using different technologies. The potential of such a service is huge as it increases the level of resilience many fold. This can be presented to the consumer in a single hand-off, avoiding a lot of the downsides of a simple backup connection, as there is no need to use different hardware, reconfigure the internal network or miss out on the extra bandwidth as the service is completely aggregated together creating one virtual service at all times.
Looking at voice protection standard services such as call answering can prove invaluable when all office communications are severed, ensuring client enquiries continue to be dealt with. Other solutions, especially with new technologies, such as VoIP, empower businesses to forward calls straight to other landline phones or mobiles in the event of loosing connectivity.
Whatever way businesses chose to protect themselves, the message is clear – with the internet and telecommunications becoming key facilitators in day-to-day business activities across a wide range of industries, forward planning and backup solutions are essential.
Piers Daniell is Director of Fluidata
www.fluidata.co.uk
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