VoIP Industry Newsletter: Topics in Disaster Recovery Planning for VoIP networks

Jul 2009

Avoiding or ignoring backup and disaster recovery planning is one of the invisible ways carriers and service providers most often cut costs, especially among smaller revenue-size providers. To purchase and implement a backup or disaster recovery plan that meets enterprise customer expectations is expensive. At VoIP Logic, our perspective on this issue is colored by the more than 130 active carriers and service providers that contract with us for VoIP infrastructure-as-a-Managed-Service. Among this group there is only a small appetite for more expensive forms of backup and disaster recovery.

This brief article and this quarter’s newsletter are about backup and disaster recovery. My goal is to give you working knowledge about these topics so that you will be curious to perhaps seek answers to some of the following questions: What happens under various scenarios of network or device outage? How does my customer experience these problems? How will we recover and how long will it take to recover? And as always, I’d like to share our experiences on how VoIP Logic plans against worst-case scenarios.

Backup and disaster recovery are predicated on different types of duplication in each of your operations decisions. There are three relevant layers of protection you can choose to use, each one providing increased insurance against outages to the network, device or application: Internal redundancy (often called “Backup”), LAN duplication (“Redundancy”) and WAN redundancy (“Disaster Recovery”). Examples of internal redundancies that VoIP Logic uses include Multiple CPUs per server, multiple network interfaces on the same hardware, dual power sources, redundant hard drives, RAID arrays to protect data, and software facilitated redundancy (Virtual IP’s) on servers. LAN redundancies generally involve another piece of hardware in the same geographic location providing hot, warm, or cold standby. Examples of LAN redundancies that VoIP Logic uses include multiple IP uplinks in case of physical outages BGP, clustered servers, dual source AC and DC power feeds from separate Universal Power Supply machines, enterprise-edition database software, as well as nightly and weekly repository data backups on important network elements. Finally, with WAN redundancies, you are providing disaster recovery in the event of a large power grid outage, Internet outage, or other catastrophic failure. This approach involves using two or more geographic locations with mirror systems and well defined primary-secondary and/or load-balancing procedures. VoIP Logic uses these precautions only on its most uptime-sensitive managed services – most notably, enterprise Class 5 – and to meet the requirements of individual customers. Many hardware and application manufacturers do not support WAN ‘hot standby’ potentially because demand for this type of protection is still low.

Often a detailed analysis from your head of Operations can uncover weaknesses. I recommend an annual audit of your VoIP (and other) infrastructure for weaknesses and/or single points of failure, and implementation of steps to remedy these flaws. And, if nothing else, you will know where you stand on these issues and you might just find you can afford some intermediary steps that can go a long way towards increasing uptime.

— Micah Singer

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