When it comes to your business, it's important to face the reality that technology can fail. That's why it's crucial to have a safety net in place.
In this blog, we'll explore the concept of server redundancy and offer four strategies to enhance the reliability of your infrastructure. From simple in-server redundancy to comprehensive disaster recovery plans, we'll provide valuable tips on how you can prevent server failures and ensure the resilience of your infrastructure.
Definition of server redundancy
Server redundancy refers to the implementation of redundant systems to prevent data loss or server failure. For example, setting up backup servers alongside a primary server ensures that if the primary server goes down, the redundant server takes over, keeping your website or application online.
Here are four steps to improve server redundancy:
1. In-server redundancy
Many believe that choosing a state-of-the-art data center guarantees a reliable infrastructure. However, server redundancy heavily relies on the design of the individual server setup.
One practical approach is the installation of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), which enhances the resilience of the infrastructure stack. RAID can be implemented at the software or hardware level, providing redundancy and performance benefits.
Different RAID levels, such as RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, are available. Each level has a distinct method of storing data across multiple drives, making certain levels more suitable for specific applications based on their requirements. Using an online RAID calculator can support RAID planning by estimating storage arrays' capacity, speed gain, and fault tolerance.
Other factors that contribute to in-server redundancy include:
- Dual power supply unit (PSU): Having two power supply units on your server ensures a backup in case one fails.
- Investing in more robust network redundancy: Activating additional network switches on your server guarantees uninterrupted network operation by allowing a redundant switch to take over if one fails.
Even high-performance servers require built-in redundancy. Combining these measures maximizes the redundancy of a single server. However, businesses need additional backup capacity beyond a single server for enhanced redundancy.
2. Backup
Backing up data from a single server onto a separate backup server or storage device is crucial for ensuring your infrastructure's continued performance and reliability. This backup server can be located in the same data hall or a physically diverse location, providing varying redundancy levels.
Regular updates should be made to the backup server or storage device, creating copies of the application's data. In a primary server failure, the backup server or storage device will contain a safe copy of the data, including its version history.
Backups are crucial in protecting against physical server faults, developer errors, and environmental threats, such as fires in the data hall. However, even with backups in place, restoring an application following an incident can still take considerable time.
3. Multi-server resiliency
Some platforms enhance their resiliency by using multiple dedicated servers. Implementing a load balancer between two or more application servers can significantly improve server redundancy.
Load balancing evenly distributes traffic across multiple servers, ensuring the continued operation of the website or application even if one of the servers becomes unavailable. Load balancers also allow applications to scale beyond the capacity of a single server.
On the other hand, if you aim to enhance the resiliency of your database software, you will need to provision additional database servers as a high availability (HA) active-passive pair. This setup means the database includes an active node for processing requests and a hot spare that can take over in a disaster.
4. Disaster recovery planning
Regardless of the hosting provider or data center you choose, having a disaster recovery plan in place is crucial for effective risk mitigation. This plan should address unforeseen incidents such as physical building damage, cyber-attacks, server failure, hardware issues, and other hardware failures.
Conclusion –
Proper planning is critical to avoiding disappointments. This principle also holds for your infrastructure. We can't ignore that hardware problems, server failures, and environmental risks are bound to occur.
By implementing measures to enhance infrastructure redundancy, you can make sure that your website or application stays up and running even during a crisis. Don't wait for the worst to happen - take action now and safeguard your online presence.
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