Well

I have a few clients that came on board recently that are more important ecommerce sites, that cant have downtime even for maintence and upgrades.

I am wondering what options are available for redundancy that are somewhat cost effective.

Joe

Joe --

Are you looking for server or network availability, or both? The options are different depending on the type of availability and the amount of money they, or you, have to spend, and the amount of bandwidth they intend to use. If you can give out a little more information -- without revealing anything about the client -- I can offer you some suggestions.

In addition to the question above, it would be helpful to know:

1. Are they colo or dedicated?
2. How many servers do they have?
3. How much bandwidth do they plan on using?
4. Do you have diverse paths within your data center?
5. Are you running any advanced protocols on your network devices (BGP, OSPF, etc)?

And the most important question:

What do you consider "somewhat cost effective" :)?

Joe,

Look into load balancing their sites and offering geographically redundant locations.

For some of our high end clients, we have load balanced web servers with replicated web servers AND a duplicate hot-standby set up at a failover location.

You'll find that as you squeeze the last .009 percent as far as reliability and uptime, you will incur some very rapidly growing costs.

Best,

Raj

Well

We have a growing number of virtual ecommerce accounts that are in need of some form of redundancy.

I know there used to be something like solid speed which was affordable on a per gb basis

They just needs something so when maintence is done, something is up

Joe

I don't think solutions like solid speed or akamai work if the primary site is down. They serve more to make sites geographically available, then to actually load balance.

Raj is right, load balancing is probably your best bet. You can get a RadWare or Coyote Point box pretty inexpensively, and as long as you don't have a single point of failure in your network infrastructure you should have no problems -- while you are performing maintenance on one switch, or one server the other switch and server are available.

This solution has the added benefit of bringing in more revenue for you, as you can charge the customers for a second account.