How Annual Disaster Recovery Tests Keep You Ready!
Redundancy and availability are two critical aspects of any network design. They provide metrics to evaluate the robustness of your network during a non-ideal scenario providing business continuity and minimizing end-user impact.
Redundancy refers to the duplication of network elements or functions such as servers, power supply, cabling, fans, etc. that continue operations during a system failure or voluntary maintenance. Availability pertains to unplanned downtime defined by time metrics indicating the tolerance level on how long a network can be offline or unavailable.
BullsEye adheres to industry standards and provides a best-case scenario of 2N redundancy with two geographically redundant data centers offering systems and services accessible at any time and four nines availability establishing a strict provision of only 52 minutes, 36 seconds downtime per year.
Customers are known to opt for a VoIP service provider who advertises such data regarding their infrastructure, but how many of them challenge the provider’s stance? It is not only important for any provider to embrace the standards as a fundamental requirement of network design, but also perform periodic audits to test the validity of their solution.
BullsEye Telecom is proud to have implemented the practice of testing our VoIP network 5 years ago. Ever since we perform the VoIP disaster recovery (DR) test annually to ensure compliance with advertised metrics and publish detailed reports on the outcome of our testing.
The VoIP DR test is usually scheduled early Q2 during a pre-published maintenance window on a Sunday morning between 2.00 AM to 7.30 AM. Customers are notified of the event in advance to prepare for the testing. During the maintenance, a controlled primary data center failure is simulated to gracefully transition all telephony services to the secondary node.
A detailed test plan is executed before simulation, post-secondary failover and post-primary failback with extensive data and log collection. The test plan includes every scenario of all VoIP solutions offered by BullsEye and validates the network interaction for each case. The collected data is reviewed in detail and shortcomings, if any, are identified and addressed before the next annual DR.
All findings with data captures are collected and published within the organization with accurate timelines. Customers seeking information about how their services were handled during the transition can request for a copy of the DR report which is shared transparently. While most of the service providers boast about their network redundancy and availability BullsEye Telecom demonstrates it!
For information on how BullsEye can help your organization in the event of a disaster, contact us below.