Redundancy: essential if you depend on your network

As society becomes ever more digitised, we depend on our networks more and more. These not only have to be secure and fast, but also constantly available to ensure continuity of business.

How reliable is your organisation or institution’s network? Can your network cope with unexpected malfunctions or maintenance work?

• Is it built in such a way that if a connection is lost your network will still be available, using an alternative route?
• Or do you have just a single network connection?

In the latter case, if this one network connection is lost, your entire network goes down.

In some cases, this can also mean critical business processes seizing up. Applications, online systems and data will be temporarily unavailable and customers cannot be reached. It may not be possible to carry out your work satisfactorily.

Does this situation apply to you? To put it another way, is your network critical to your operations and are the consequences of it going down huge? If this is the case, a redundant network is the solution for you.

In this blog, you can read how redundant connections can help you reduce to the minimum the risk of your entire network failing.

Consequences of your network connection failing

You as an organisation or institution are best placed to estimate the impact of the consequences of ‘down time’.

• Can you continue to work – at least in part?
• Can your personnel carry on in other ways?
• What effect does this have on customers, or patients?
• Can they still be helped, or will they too suffer from the effects of the malfunction?
• And what does this mean for the continuity of your business?
• Will you suffer damages (including to your image)?
• Will it impact turnover?

All issues that need to be taken into consideration. If the consequences are considerable, you would benefit from network infrastructure that makes use of redundant connections.

In fact, in some cases redundancy is essential.

• For example in hospitals, which have to be accessible 100% of the time as care has to be provided at all times and patient records must be available 24/7 – without this crucial data it would take much longer to draw up treatment plans.
• Or in education, as digital learning is part of the teaching schedule. How can you provide digital lessons if the internet is down?
• And then there are government bodies that have great difficulty providing their services to citizens if the network is not working.

If you want to prevent network failure in 99.99999 percent of cases: make your network redundant!

What is redundancy?

Redundancy means making use of several connections. This is called a ‘ring structure’, which sends data through two connections, each taking its own, unique route. If one of the connections fails, the traffic is automatically routed through the second connection, so the whole network continues to function.

An important aspect of this is that it has to involve physically separate infrastructure. For example, if you are using two different service providers, it is important to check the layout of the fibre optics cables. Is it known what route these connections take? It could be that the connections offered by these service providers run in part along the same route, use the same fibre optics cables or run through the same channels. Such a ‘redundant’ network can still cause major problems; for example if a cable is damaged or if maintenance is carried out at the same time.

In the case of full redundancy – i.e. physically separate routes – this cannot happen, so the risk of down time is reduced to zero.

How can you achieve (full) redundancy?

The explanation of redundancy above says it all really: by creating an IT infrastructure consisting of several connections.

• Each of these following its own, unique route within the network.
• These routes may not intersect anywhere; connections may not go through the same cables or the same channels.
• If your organisation has several branches or you store data externally in a data centre, these connections must also be redundant.

This may sound complicated, but it needn’t be. This can be done using our reliable Dark Fiber network.

We will be happy to discuss the various options with you. Have you already rented an existing connection from one of our colleagues/competitors? In this case, we can examine with you how to achieve a fully redundant pathway in relation to this connection.

Building good infrastructure lies at the heart of your network and we can provide this solid foundation for you.

Relined Fiber Network’s redundant network

If you want to guarantee connectivity, you should choose the redundant connection solutions offered by Relined Fiber Network. We have more than 30,000 kilometres of high-grade fibre optics infrastructure, providing nationwide coverage and a fine-meshed Dark Fiber network. Pretty much every location can be reached!

With our fibre optics network, we provide organisations and institutions with a range of redundant connections throughout the Netherlands and Germany.

Our routes are also unique!

A large part of our network is carried by power pylons and railway embankments – the great advantage of which is that we are often able to achieve the shortest routes between cities, resulting in less attenuation. In addition, these locations are more secure, as the cables do not pass through public land. They are not easily accessed, meaning that the risk of cable breakage is significantly reduced.

Our network is constantly developing. We enter into close partnerships with our customers in order to regularly connect new data centres redundantly to our network. There are currently some 125 of these in the Netherlands and Germany, of which approx. 35 in internet hub Amsterdam and approx. 20 located in Frankfurt’s metro network.