👷‍♂️Achieving Business Continuity with Geographic Diverse Data Centres Using SD-WAN⛓️‍💥

In today's digital economy, business continuity is a top priority, and geographic diversity in data centers has become a critical consideration for organizations looking to safeguard against disruptions. However, simply spreading out your data centers isn’t enough—ensuring resilient, high-performance connectivity between these sites is equally important. This is where SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Networking) shines, offering unparalleled network resilience and performance to support seamless business operations, even in the face of unexpected outages.

The Risks Facing Modern Data Centres

Modern data centres, despite their robust designs, face numerous potential risks that can disrupt operations. One of the most headline-grabbing incidents involves lithium-based batteries used in uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems catching fire. These batteries, while providing essential backup power, can overheat, leading to catastrophic fires that threaten entire facilities.

Other historical outages have been caused by:

• Power grid failures: As data centres are dependent on stable power sources, even backup generators can fail due to fuel shortages or mechanical breakdowns.

• Water ingress and flooding: Heavy rains or infrastructure failures can cause water damage to critical equipment.

• Cooling system failures: Without adequate cooling, servers can quickly overheat, leading to total shutdowns.

• Natural disasters: Earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes have all caused significant damage to data center infrastructure.

• Human error: From accidental cable cuts to software misconfigurations, human mistakes remain a leading cause of data center outages.

Given these risks, businesses need a strategy that can mitigate the impact of any single site going offline. That’s where geographically distributed data centres come into play, providing a way to shift workloads to a secondary location when primary sites face disruptions. But how do you ensure reliable, efficient, and resilient connectivity between these locations?

The Role of SD-WAN in Connectivity Resilience

SD-WAN is the ideal solution for ensuring resilient, high-performance connectivity between geographically diverse data centres and business locations. Traditional WAN technologies, like MPLS or DMVPN, often struggle with the agility, scalability, and flexibility needed to ensure consistent uptime and failover capabilities. SD-WAN addresses these limitations by leveraging multiple connection types, such as broadband, LTE, and MPLS, to create a highly resilient network that can automatically reroute traffic based on real-time conditions.

Here’s why SD-WAN is the best approach for connecting geographically diverse data centres:

1. Last Mile Resilience:

   • SD-WAN allows businesses to use multiple last-mile providers to ensure connectivity to their data centres. This means if one link goes down, SD-WAN can dynamically route traffic over the remaining healthy links. This automatic failover happens seamlessly, ensuring your business applications remain online without interruption. This capability is vital when connecting multiple data centres or branch locations to maintain business continuity.

2. Geographically Diverse Public Internet and Private WAN Access:

   • With SD-WAN, businesses can use multiple data centres for both public internet access and private WAN access. For instance, if one data center experiences an outage, traffic can automatically shift to another location without any manual intervention. This flexibility is key to ensuring businesses maintain seamless operations, whether they are accessing cloud services or running critical internal applications.

3. Dynamic Path Selection for Optimal Performance:

   • SD-WAN continuously monitors the quality of all available network links, making real-time decisions based on latency, packet loss, and jitter. If performance drops on one path, traffic can be dynamically rerouted to maintain high-quality connections—something traditional WAN solutions struggle to achieve.

4. Load Balancing and Bandwidth Aggregation:

   • In addition to resilience, SD-WAN can aggregate bandwidth across multiple links, allowing businesses to fully utilize their available connectivity resources. This results in better overall performance, reducing bottlenecks and ensuring high availability of data center resources.

5. Reduced Complexity and Cost:

   • Traditional networking solutions require complex manual configurations and significant investment in specialized hardware. SD-WAN, by contrast, simplifies the deployment and management of geographically diverse data centres by providing centralized management, automated policies, and zero-touch provisioning. This not only reduces operational complexity but also slashes costs, allowing businesses to use cost-effective internet links without sacrificing performance or reliability.

Historical Outages Highlight the Need for Resilience

The importance of geographic diversity and resilient connectivity is underscored by several major data center outages in recent years:

• In 2017, a fire at a Samsung data center in South Korea caused widespread service disruptions across its cloud infrastructure. Had resilient connectivity been in place, traffic could have been immediately rerouted to backup data centres without impacting customers.

• In 2021, a European data center was knocked offline due to a cooling failure, impacting cloud services across the region. Businesses relying on a single data center were left scrambling to restore operations.

• A more recent 2023 lithium battery fire at a North American data center underscores the unpredictable nature of such incidents, and why multiple sites with resilient connectivity are essential for business continuity.

Proactive Measures for Improved Uptime

Beyond just responding to outages, SD-WAN’s real-time monitoring and analytics enable businesses to take proactive measures to avoid disruptions altogether. For instance, SD-WAN can monitor rising error rates on links and automatically divert traffic to better-performing routes, preventing minor issues from escalating into major outages. This proactive approach minimizes downtime and ensures smoother operations.

Similarly, Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) can be used to detect third-party interference in fiber links, alerting businesses to potential disruptions before they occur. When combined with SD-WAN’s ability to instantly shift traffic, this kind of proactive monitoring helps businesses avoid outages altogether, rather than simply reacting after the fact.

Wrap

In a world where business continuity is paramount, relying solely on geographic diversity for your data centres isn’t enough. The key to true resilience lies in how you connect those data centres and ensure high availability across your network. SD-WAN is the answer, offering dynamic path selection, automatic failover, and simplified management—all of which ensure that your business remains online, no matter what challenges arise.

From mitigating the risk of lithium battery fires to safeguarding against human error or natural disasters, SD-WAN empowers businesses to maintain connectivity between diverse data centres, enabling seamless operations and a proactive approach to network resilience.

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Ronald Bartels ensures that Internet inhabiting things are connected reliably online at Fusion Broadband South Africa - the leading specialized SD-WAN provider in South Africa. Learn more about the best SD-WAN in the world: 👉Contact Fusion

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