BUSINESS CONTINUNITY MINI GUIDE. A guide to how DrayTek solutions can keep your business connected even when lines and devices fail.

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1 BUSINESS CONTINUNITY MINI GUIDE A guide to how DrayTek solutions can keep your business connected even when lines and devices fail.

2 Introduction Connecting to the internet is an everyday occurrence for just about all of us in both our personal and business life. Whether we re on social media, checking , surfing the web or accessing office systems there is an expectation to get connected every time so when it doesn t work it can be at best annoying and at worst costly or damaging. For businesses there have been huge developments in technology embracing the relatively low cost, high speed and pervasive nature of the internet that reduce costs, improve reliability and help better engage with customers and prospects. With businesses every more reliant on these cloud services to operate effectively, any inconsistency or failure in the connection to the internet can have a major impact. As reliance on cloud services increase, so does the importance of connectivity and this Business Continuity mini guide aims to help businesses identify the critical points of failure that can occur and offer solutions from DrayTek that offer a contingency option. The good news is that the business continuity in your business can be drastically improved relatively easily and without huge costs by a simple review of your network setup and implementation of the right solution. Within this guide we cover the main drivers leading to connectivity reliance, the types of business continuity strategies to consider and the practical solutions available from DrayTek. We hope that you find the guide useful and that this may lead to you considering a DrayTek solution! 3

3 No Internet = No Work Remote Access Businesses can take advantage of the Internet to connect remote branches, home workers and road warriors to internal systems. Constant connection is essential for all of these environments. What s driving the need for Business Continuity? Cloud Computing Apps and Data With applications residing in the cloud together with the accompanying data it is essential for individuals to be able to access this at all times. A break in connection or even a temporary reduction in service can have a profound effect on the business in reduced efficiency, poor customer service and lost business. In short the connection to the internet can be viewed as the essential umbilical cord to business success. Point of Sale Any organisation transacting with credit/debit cards requires constant fast connection to the banks so they can process their customers quickly and efficiently. 4 5

4 The Case for a Business Continuity solution Voice over IP (VoIP) and multimedia With the simplicity and scalability of modern VoIP systems organisations are taking advantage of the low cost connection to the Internet for both outbound and incoming calls. These environments require a constant connection and a dedicated allocation of bandwidth to ensure a consistent quality of service. In the previous section we have seen some of the common requirements businesses have to connect to the Internet. There may be many more but the one thing they have in common is that to work effectively there needs to be continuity and consistency of internet service. In order to maintain the level of service required organisations need to consider all of the potential weak points and decide what contingencies are required to be put on place. Simply hoping that all will be well inevitably lead to what can be a catastrophic problem. There are 4 main areas to consider: Hosted VoIP Some organisations are abandoning the concept of a locally installed PBX and are adopting a hosted platform managed in the cloud supplied by an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP). Organisations can easily scale up or down according to needs and only pay for the number of phones in use. Any loss of connection or interruption of service can cut the phones off or deliver poor quality calls. 1. Adding line resilience to the network - One of the first things typically considered is a contingency for line failure or Line Resilience as we term this. Most of us have experienced a loss of connection to the Internet for one reason or another, so if a second line can be made immediately available a potential outage can be avoided with little or no disruption. 6 7

5 2. Implementing a hardware redundancy solution - Not every piece of hardware remains perfect forever and on occasions specific devices may fail for a variety of reasons. Power supply failure, corrupted firmware, accidental damage can all be contributory factors to a catastrophic hardware failure. Organisations may consider implementing a contingency to this by having a replacement piece of hardware on standby that can immediately take over in place of the faulty device thus maintaining service. This solution set we term as High Availability. 3. Fine tuning the bandwidth to be application specific - The internet connection for most organisations is the slowest part of the network. With Gigabit LAN commonly utilised within an organisation even the highest speed broadband services are significantly slower making the Internet connection the main bottleneck in the network. In times of high usage this can have a major negative effect on bandwidth sensitive applications such as VoIP and multimedia. In short the best telephone system in the world may sound terrible if insufficient bandwidth is made available for the calls. Organisations will consider utilising a business class router solution that can fine tune the available bandwidth optimising the connection for these types of connection. 8 9

6 4. Balancing traffic across all available connections - organisations with more than one connection into their building will want to ensure that traffic makes full use of the available connections efficiently. No point in one link struggling to operate at maximum capacity with another virtually idle which can easily happen if traffic load is not constantly monitored. A router solution with a weighted load balancing feature will ensure that just the right amount of traffic goes down each link irrespective of their relative speeds. The DrayTek Business Continuity Solution Set Line Resilience This is the ability for a secondary connection to automatically become available and pass traffic in the event of the main connection failing thus maintaining consistent internet service. In DrayTek routers there are different options to achieve this but the basic concept is that more than one Internet service is connected to the router consisting of primary connection that remains permanently connected in normal circumstances and secondary connection that usually remains passive and only pass traffic if the primary fails. Here is a diagram depicting this in simple terms. 3G/4G and LTE One of the most cost effective ways of providing line resilience is to create a secondary connection using a 3G/4G service. With the expansion of these services across the country and increase in competition the costs have reduced, the speeds increased and coverage expanded. This makes 3G/4G a practical solution for many organisations especially with the use of pay as you go contracts

7 DrayTek can assist in implementing a 3G/4G line resilient solution with their Vigor 2860L series of LTE routers. With the same business class features to DrayTek s popular Vigor 2860 series the L variants have built in 3G/4G (LTE) connectivity compatible with pretty much all of the UK/Ireland cellular networks. A standard SIM slot is available in the back of the router allowing for the card to be pushed in similar to how you would do it on a mobile phone. There s a cover to prevent accidental removal, see diagram right: Once in place the router can be configured in line failover mode with traffic passing across a primary connection under normal circumstances e.g. a VDSL/ADSL link, that is diverted to the secondary 3G/4G link in the event of a main link failure. When the primary connection returns the secondary connection disconnects and all traffic switches back to normal operation thus limiting incremental network charges. The Vigor 2860L series ships with two LTE antennae that can be attached directly to the router or positioned away from the device using its magnetic extension allowing users to fine tune the exact aerial position for optimum signal strength. Line Resilience 3G/4G and LTE... As well as LTE connectivity for data, the Vigor 2860Ln makes good use of SMS text messaging. Texts can be sent to the router to check its status or even reboot it with an appropriate command. 3G/4G for non L routers DrayTek recommend the L class routers for 3G/4G connectivity however for customers of DrayTek that may have recently purchase a standard router without this capability and can t justify upgrading it is possible to retro enable this with the use of a dongle. Most of our Business Class routers support USB connections that in turn can be used to plug in a 3G/4G dongle. There are many types of dongle available so care needs to be taken to ensure a compatible one is selected (see compatibility chart) but essentially once attached the router will handle primary/ secondary failover in an identical way as previously described in the L series

8 Physical Line Resilience DrayTek business class routers provide connectivity to multiple connections and different types of broadband. Combining this for example the Vigor 2860 series can connect to up to 4 links presented as ADSL, VDSL, Ethernet WAN (Virgin Media) and 3G/4G. Combining this with the line failover feature provides for many potential combinations depending on the needs of the customer and technologies available in the area. As well as the 3G/4G backup scenarios previous described a VDSL primary connection could have an ADSL secondary connection available, a Virgin Media primary could have a VDSL secondary connection and so on. Generally speaking it is good practice to mix different types of broadband form different service providers to try and avoid single points of failure, For example a primary VDSL connection complemented with an ADSL secondary connection from the same service provider could potentially have common points on the network that if failed could impact both lines in the same way. Hardware redundancy Organisations with mission critical sites where any outage could have catastrophic implications may wish to further enhance the reliability of the network by providing a contingency for hardware failure. DrayTek have a strong reputation for hardware reliability however external factors can sometimes lead to a failure. DrayTek have a feature called High Availability (HA) in their Business Class routers that allows for two routers (see comparison chart below) that allows for two routers to be set up such that if one of them fails, the other automatically picks up all traffic thus delivering unbroken continuity of service to the organisation. There are two ways to set this up 1. Hot-Standby This type of high availability has both routers connected to the same internet connection(s). The primary router would use the internet connections as normal while the secondary router would keep the internet connections in standby or offline unless a failover occurs. If the primary router does go offline, the secondary router would take over the internet connection(s) and bring them online, resuming normal connectivity. This is achieved by using a switch to share the same physical interface between the primary and secondary routers and is well suited to Ethernet WAN interfaces. 14 Here s a diagram of line failover in operation Configuration Syncing 15

9 When managing multiple routers being used for high availability and using the Hot Standby redundancy method, DrayTek routers can automatically synchronise the configuration of the primary router with the secondary router(s), which simplifies the management of multiple routers. Load Balancing As we have previously described DrayTek business class routers enable simultaneous connection of multiple broadband services. As well as utilising this for line failover, organisations can combine multiple connections for simultaneous and constant use. This is essential when the maximum speed of the available broadband is less that the requirements of the business requiring more than one connection to be made available. Load Balancing is a feature whereby your router has more than one WAN (Internet) connection and distributes your Internet traffic across all of them. Load balancing can operate over any number of WAN feeds and they can be of different types - for example an ADSL connection and a fibre connection. 2. Active Standby This type of high availability uses different WAN interfaces on each router, which is used where the primary and secondary routers would have different physical connections and cannot share the physical interface, such as the VDSL2 interface of a Vigor 2860 router. These connections could be made to different ISPs to reduce the risk of internet connectivity loss being caused by a single point of failure, in this case the ISP, while still having redundant hardware. It is not possible for a pair of DSL routers to connect to the same DSL line directly because if one modem has 'sync' another modem cannot connect, or if they both attempt sync. at the same time, they will clash. The purpose of load balancing is either: 1. To try to achieve a uniform traffic balance - spreading connections equally across your WAN connections, thus making best use of your available bandwidth or 2. To distribute traffic according to a set of rules defining which WAN feed should be used for a given data or connection type. For example one connection just for VoIP the other for data

10 In a DrayTek router load balancing can be implemented in two ways: Simple Load Balancing the router will alternate sessions equally across the available links. For example, assuming two links available, session 1 forced down link 1, session 2 down link 2, session 3 back to link 1 and so on. This way an equal amount of sessions are balanced across all available links. This set up is ideal when all available links have the same speed however in many situations different links may have different capacities. Bandwidth Weighting for situations of different link speeds e.g. a VDSL link at 80Mg and an ADSL link at 20Mg a DrayTek router can apply a distribution ratio such that 4 times as many connections (sessions) are sent over the VDSL connection compared to the ADSL as it has 4 times the capacity. Line Failover when using Load Balancing We have previously described line failover within this guide which is very closely related to Load Balancing. If a connection that forms part of a load balancing setup fails, all traffic can be diverted down the remaining link and a new set of QoS rules applied that become relevant with the new network availability. For example let s say all VoIP traffic was dedicated to one of the links and that link failed. All VoIP traffic is then diverted down another remaining link but now has to share the available bandwidth. In this case it s essential that QoS is applied to ensure high quality of the VoIP service

11 Fine tuning with Quality of Service (QoS) Even with the most stable internet service supported by line resilience and hardware redundancy as previously described the quality of individual applications can vary dependant on other traffic sharing the same link. For example heavy usage of video streaming services such as You Tube can hog much of the available bandwidth that in turn has a negative effect on other types of traffic. A major print run or large file transfer can have a similar effect. Different types of traffic are affected in different ways in the event of network congestion, for example small delays in getting through may not matter but even a slight deterioration in connectivity for VoIP may mean that the phone system doesn t work at all. It may also be or paramount importance that certain users e.g. the MD or FD have the highest priority when using the network because of the relative importance of their work. For all these and many more scenarios DrayTek routers provide a facility called Quality of Service (QoS) that can be flexibly implemented to precisely meet the needs of the organisation. There are three stages associated with setting up QoS Stage 1 define the Class of service We are hopefully all familiar with the concept of class of travel when we fly e.g. First Class, Business Class, Standard etc and this is analogous to the first part of setting up QoS in a DrayTek router. Class 1 is applied to the most important traffic that has the highest priority typically including VoIP. Class 2 applies to the next most important priority traffic then Class 3, then unprioritised. A class can be associated with a type of traffic e.g SIP which associates with VoIP, a department or individual, VPN traffic, specific IP addresses and many other combinations. Simply put traffic in a higher class will be less impacted by traffic congestion or variation in the broadband service Stage 2 define reserved bandwidth Once all traffic have been segmented into the appropriate Class the reserved bandwidth ratio can be set. This sets a reserved %age of bandwidth to be constantly available to all traffic associated with that class. For example 25% of available bandwidth may be set against Class 1 traffic thus ensuring a constant high quality/priority connection

12 DrayTek product sets that offer the full set of Resilience and Redundancy Features Vigor 2860 series DrayTek s flagship business class router packed with features including support for all the main broadband technologies, WiFi and LTE Vigor 2925 series Similar to Vigor 2860 but with Ethernet WAN physical connections. Vigor 2960 DrayTek s entry level VPN concentrator/firewall supporting up to 64 VPNs with 500Mg throughput Vigor 3900 DrayTek; s top of the range VPN concentrator/firewall supporting up to 500 VPNs with 1Gb throughput. Vigor 130 A zero touch configuration VDSL router suitable for connecting any Ethernet WAN device to a\ VDSL service. Referenced with regard to load balancing scenarios with 2 xdsl services DrayTek is the leading manufacturer of business class broadband and networking solutions. These help consumers and businesses save money and improve efficiency by exploiting the full potential of the Internet. The product range includes routers, firewalls, PBXs, IP Phones, switches and wireless access points. visit: 22 Copyright 2015 SEG / DrayTek UK. Material may not be copied or re-published in part or full without permission. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change at any time without notice. E&OE.