What are High Availability Redundancy Solutions? 

What are High Availability Redundancy Solutions? 

Continuity of operations is a paramount concern for many businesses, ensuring that your business can continue to operate in the event of a hardware failure, cyber attack or other natural disasters. The backbone of this operational resilience lies in the robustness of your business’s IT infrastructure. Many businesses have solutions such as; 321 Backup and Disaster Recover Plans in place to help them backup and restore their data promptly to continue business operations. However, High Availability Redundancy Solutions are pivotal in ensuring that essential data and IT systems remain uninterrupted and continuously available, thus aiding businesses to continue to operate in an emergency and therefore keep a competitive edge. 

High Availability (HA) and Redundancy are two terms that often go hand in hand when talking about a resilient IT infrastructure.  

High Availability refers to the systems and processes in place that ensure a network remains operational and accessible, despite unforeseen hitches. This often involves secondary connections or hardware to ensure continued uptime if primary connectivity or hardware becomes unavailable. 

Redundancy, on the other hand, is about having backup solutions and processes or components in place that can be manually triggered or in some cases can automatically take over in case of a failure, thereby reducing downtime. 

The Core Components of High Availability Redundancy Solutions 

Failover Clustering:
Failover clustering is a cornerstone of High Availability (HA) Redundancy Solutions. It groups together multiple servers to operate alongside each other that contain the same data/databases and are constantly kept up to date in real-time, so that if one server encounters a problem, the workload is immediately shifted to another server within the cluster, ensuring near uninterrupted service. 

Load Balancing:
Load balancing distributes network traffic across several servers to ensure no single server becomes a bottleneck, which in turn maintains optimal performance and availability. 

Replication:
Live data replication is an essential aspect of High Availability Redundancy Solutions, it is the act of managing that data is synchronised between multiple locations, ensuring that an up-to-date copy of the data is always available, thus promoting data integrity and availability. 

Monitoring and Maintenance:
Continuous monitoring of data synchronisation and regular maintenance of servers is crucial for identifying potential issues, conducting regular updates, and more before they escalate into serious problems. This helps to maintain an elevated level of availability and ensure that issues do not affect all servers within the cluster. 

Backup and Recovery:
Whilst High Availability Solutions can significantly reduce downtime, especially for businesses that require continuous uptime, high availability is not a replacement for Backup Solutions, it is an addition to business continuity and redundancy planning. Having a solid backup and recovery plan is essential for safeguarding data from Cyber Threats, ensuring that systems can be quickly restored in the event of an attack that may corrupt or make all data inaccessible. 

The Business Benefits of Implementing High Availability Redundancy Solutions 

Reduced Downtime:
By implementing High Availability (HA) Redundancy Solutions, businesses can significantly reduce or effectively eliminate downtime, which could otherwise result in lost revenue, diminished customer trust, and a tarnished brand reputation. 

Enhanced Performance:
High Availability (HA) Redundancy Solutions not only aid in preventing service interruptions but also aid in optimising the performance of the IT infrastructure, reducing the risks of a single point of failure, and thereby ensuring a seamless user experience. 

Cost Efficiency:
Although the initial investment in High Availability (HA) Redundancy Solutions and Clustered Failover might seem substantial, the long-term cost savings achieved by averting downtime-related losses can be significant. 

Compliance and Risk Management:
Many industries have regulatory requirements concerning data handling, availability, and integrity. High Availability (HA) Redundancy Solutions can aid in meeting these requirements, thereby mitigating legal and financial risks. 

Competitive Advantage:
Maintaining a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure can provide a significant competitive advantage over your competition. Any downtime caused by a cyber attack or hardware failure can significantly impact a business’s ability to meet customer demand and can lead to significant financial losses as well as a loss of trust. By ensuring the continuous availability of critical systems, businesses can respond swiftly to market changes and customer demands. 

Other Examples of High Availability 

High Availability Data Connectivity: For Many businesses, your internet connection is your lifeline to the outside world as well as your primary means of accessing your key business data. High Availability Data Connectivity involves two (or more) internet connections into your office with hardware in place to manage traffic over the connections and reroute traffic if one connection becomes unavailable. Usually, this is done through lines provided by multiple different providers to ensure that if one provider experienced issues it would not affect the other. 

High Availability Network Infrastructure: Similar to Data Connectivity, critical infrastructure such as primary switches and firewalls can operate in high availability to both manage traffic to reduce bottlenecks, but also to reroute traffic if one becomes unavailable. 

High Availability Database Clustering: Businesses who operate in areas such as manufacturing may rely on databases for their IOT (Internet of Things) manufacturing devices to connect with to manage production. They may not need other data (such as files or folders) available as part of their cluster and can rely on traditional backup and restore solutions for this other data. Database/SQL Clustering means that business IOT devices can access and update this synchronised data within the cluster and that traffic can be routed to other servicers/devices within the cluster if one becomes unavailable through network infrastructure redundancy. 

High Availability Power: High Availability Power is common in businesses that operate their on-site servers. Usually referred to as UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply), these devices provide a battery backup for critical equipment to ensure that they can continue to operate for a limited amount of time in the event of a brief power failure but can also assist with the safe shut down of equipment if power is unavailable for an extended period. In other cases, some businesses also operate a tertiary power backup in the form of a generator that can provide extended power for critical infrastructure to assist the UPS in maintaining power for an extended period until power can be restored. Solutions such as these are often deployed in businesses that operate 24/7 manufacturing or suffer regular power brownouts. 

How can TwentyFour help your business? 

Investing in High Availability Redundancy Solutions is essential for businesses that require minimum operational downtime for continued operation, operate multiple sites that require live data synchronised between sites, or are simply keen on ensuring the uninterrupted operation of their essential IT infrastructure.

We have helped businesses throughout the UK (United Kingdom) implement high-availability redundancy solutions to assist with continued uptime across a range of industries. 

If you would like to find out more about High Availability Redundancy Solutions, contact us to find out more.