Exponential-e can provide fully replicated disaster-recovery back-up supported by low-latency next-generation networking. The solution enables your business to run smoothly even in the event of a local outage. Our use of Ethernet across the wide area– based on VPLS technology – provides a simple and ubiquitous service interface, extending your virtualised server environment throughout the WAN.

In the event of an outage, replicated data is mirrored to a virtual server anywhere in the WAN, and can be made operational instantaneously. Next Generation Networking from Exponential-e eliminates bottle-necks and single-points-of-failure associated with a hub and spoke DR architecture.

Below is a real-life example of how we put this technology to use for one of our customers:

The client’s legacy WAN looked like this:

There was 1 hub site and 3 spoke sites.  One of the spoke sites was used for Disaster Recovery (DR) and, were DR ever to be invoked, the staff and services from the affected site would be relocated there.

The hub serves the spoke sites with centrally held files, print and application services. Internet access was also provided at the hub site using a 2Mb Internet leased line. Each of the spoke sites used a 2Mb point to point leased line to privately connect back to the Hub site accessing the central services.

The problems:

The client’s bandwidth requirements had long outgrown the 2Mbps capacity of the existing leased lines and the network performance was suffering. Critically, there was no way of replicating the hub site communications at the DR site to offer true Business Continuity without having to install a second infrastructure based on leased lines.

In addition, the client’s services had outgrown their communications room and become more and more critical to the business, so a fully equipped hosting environment was also required.  Building an on-site datacentre simply wasn’t practical with the available space not to mention the additional spend it would incur.

The challenge:

Exponential-e was asked to provide a multi-site solution to replace the existing WAN and overcome all of the above problems.

The network is absolutely mission-critical to the client and so the design had to offer full resilience and a completely seamless transition.  It had to be a flexible design that would support growing bandwidth requirements and also the addition of new sites and services allowing the client’s business to grow and evolve.

The Solution:

Exponential-e proposed a solution that offered increased and scalable bandwidth with both resilience and QoS incorporated to ensure that the right data is delivered at the right priority at optimum speed and availability. Furthermore, we consolidated the client’s DR, removing bottlenecks to offer true business continuity.

A combination of various types of circuit was used to connect each site into our network, including 10Mbit and 100Mbit optical fibre circuits, Ethernet E1s and private SDSL, with two diverse circuits installed at each site to promote business continuity.

The client’s firewalls, email and various other services were centrally co-located in a carrier-neutral facility. Then each site, including the co-location facility, was connected to a VPLS private WAN giving ‘any-to-any’ connectivity between all of the sites, with access to the Internet and the centralised services directly from the co-location site.

Access to the de-militarised zone (DMZ), now held centrally, was distributed between the hub and co-location sites, optimising use of both the Internet and private connections. 

Furthermore, re-locating the hub site services to a central on-net facility removed both ‘bottlenecks’ at the hub and also prevented the 'trombone' effect and the associated waste of bandwidth inherent with hub and spoke designs.  Centralisation maximises business continuity as no site is now dependant on any other for day to day operations. In fact, such is the design, that should the main site ever fail, every other site will continue to operate as usual, connecting to the centralised services with no interruption.  Extra bandwidth capacity was provisioned at the DR site to support a DR invocation and accommodate the extra staff that would be located there should the need ever arise.

The client can also rest happy in the knowledge that their services are housed in a custom built facility with full n+1 power resilience, physical security and environmental controls.

Remarkably, all of this was delivered at 90% of the client’s current spend, and provided a 500% increase in capacity.