Deploying a GEO DNS Failover for DevOps

Disaster recovery and business resilience are key components of the data center infrastructure. The popularity of private and shared (collocated) data centers, along with the emergence of cloud computing, has increased the need for exceedingly robust network resilience policies that address availability and security while maintaining the agility and flexibility of the cloud model.

The challenges of supporting business continuity in these environments are often not limited to a single data center or physical area. While source and destination hosts can be located in the same data center, it is not unusual to find them spread over multiple physical or virtual locations, interconnected by a transport mechanism that provides load balancing, security, and end-to-end segmentation.

The Free LoadMaster from Kemp address the business-continuity issues of enterprise and service provider implementations by delivering a set of services for building a proof of concept that brings a real-time DNS failover model to your application architecture. This architecture is designed to support the extension of network and compute resources for multiple data centers in multiple locations, validate absolute uptime, and deliver effective disaster recovery for locally and globally dispersed applications at all times. Using this model, you can put the Free LoadMaster through its paces to render real time traffic management decisions within a non-production environment and manage application SLAs based on the metrics critical to your applications’ performance.

The Free LoadMaster includes the Kemp Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB) feature set. This feature set allows you to conduct in-house load balancing between multiple locations, including in-house data centers, public cloud, hosted private cloud, and managed service providers.

When a Free LoadMaster receives a DNS request, it inspects the source IP address of the request, deduces the geographic source of the request, and then routes the request to the appropriate site based on considerations such as site proximity, site health, and the response time for retrieving content and services. Consider the following example:

• If the requesting host resides in somewhere in the United States, it can be directed to servers in New York, Dallas, or Los Angeles.
• If the requesting host is located in Paris, it can be directed to servers in London or Brussels.
• If the requesting host is located in Seoul, it can be directed to servers in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur.

As these examples show, the GSLB features deliver several key advantages, including:

• Using intelligent DNS to reduce response times and the use of pricey international data connections by directing users automatically to servers that reside within their own geographic regions.
• Enhancing user experiences by moving users away from networks and servers that are congested, encountering bottlenecks, or experiencing outages.
• Increasing fault-tolerance and availability by allowing multi-site content and service deployment, guarding against failures in the event of local or regional network outages, power outages or natural disasters

We invite you to evaluate the Free LoadMaster and see for yourself how it enables simplified operations, delivers maximal business value, and achieves faster ROI while lowering TCO, CAPEX, and OPEX.