Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Check out this idea???

[TonyGM]

Can anyone tell me what you think of this idea (and for security purposes I have already copyrighted it with the local court, and COCm)

I was thinking of running my own network operations center out of my dad's office, he works in HVAC, but is only 100 feet from the local USWEST office, or qwest if needed -- bleh! anyways, I was thinking of running four DS lines, hoping 3M burstable on each one.

Where my idea comes in is each site sharing an IP address, the same one, and I will register the IP as poolable, so if one DS line goes down, I can simple enter the numbers in the other DS line, with a different provider, and resume operations as if nothing ever happened.

how would I go about getting going on this, email me -- tony@lexton.net with any suggestions!!

Also, what kind of server(s) do i need to buy to guarantee 100% uptime, and ultimate redundancy?

[Phoenix]

You want to set up your NOC so that you have multiple transit carriers coming in and if one DS circuit goes down then all sites will be reachable via the other circuit through the other providers. The term for this is 'multi-homing'.

This does work well to provide a high level of redundancy, we've been using mult-homing in our NOC for years. We use 4 different carriers for our transit, and our routers handle the decision of which carrier to use. This is done using BGP, which is kind of a pain as you need to get the providers to run BGP with you (and you may have to tell them how to do it.).

But it doesn't require changing the IP addresses on your DNS servers (which I believe is what you were referring to) changing the IP addresses on your DNS servers will cause them to be unreachable for a while(that is not something that can be changed in real time) the routers will take care of moving the traffic around the circuit that isn't working at the moment, and if you have load balancing in place, they will also make sure that no one circuit gets more than the others.

As to guaranteeing 100% uptime and ultimate redundancy. It takes more than the right servers to do that.

If you want to send me a message offline, I'll be glad to help you find more information regarding multi-homing, BGP, and uptime. And pass along some of the things we've learned the hard way.

[IPC PRO]

You can get total redundancy by setting up the 1/2RU servers below and clustering them in pairs (or setting them to mirror over the additional NIC's). This is extremely less expensive than buying individual five 9's servers. Also, it seems you will be working with limited floor space, and you could do an awful lot of hosting if these were set up properly.
As far as the cabling and bandwidth goes, I am a hardware guy. Phoenix sounds like he knows what he's talking about.