Symetrik Domino Consulting

Archive for the ‘Failover’ Category

We have sites in South America where network connectivity is very unreliable. We have MPLS lines connecting the remote offices in those locations, and we also have Internet access from each of the offices.

When setting up our replication/mail routing architecture in these locations where connectivity is unstable we got a little creative.

First, we have our hub servers in the Home office in Hong Kong. These hub servers do all of the replication from Hub to spoke. This cuts down on the overall replication overhead on the network. The idea is that cluster cache doesn’t have to be rebuilt every time if we have only the hubs replicating to the spokes. At the end of the day, network utilization and time required to replicate is actually lower.

We also put clusters in each site. This alleviates downtime in the event that one of the servers goes down. Since we have clusters, we can set the connection document to replicate with the cluster instead of the individual servers. This provides much benefit because replication still occurs if one server is down. It also reduces the network utilization in half because replication will only occur one time, to the cluster, instead of twice to each individual server. Read the rest of this entry »