Providence hosts compliance and environmental data for customers. Providence’s e-mail, accounting/timesheet software, and compliance/monitoring applications all function over the Internet, for its employees, subcontractors and clients, and all are hosted internally. The company has approximately 120 employees located in Dallas, Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, La., and home offices, all of whom are entirely dependent on having reliable high-available WAN performance.
Problem
Due to the high standards of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), companies are required to keep records of all emissions. Providence assists its customers by hosting regulatory compliance applications online. If Providence’s clients are unable to access the servers, or if Providence cannot notify them about their chemical emission levels, this results in compliance hazards. For example, if a petro-chemical client is validating how much chemical is in the air, and Providence is unable to notify them due to a network outage, the client will not be able to get its notification, and find out its compliance status.
“When I started with the company, we had a single T1 connection for e-mail, VPN, hosted applications and Web access,” said Wesley Corie, a network administrator for Providence. “We then added a secondary business-class cable connection for redundancy. The problem was that we had no network link load balancing or domain name system (DNS) failover, which is critical for us, because we host resources internally. If one ISP link goes down, we would be offline.”
Providence records data from its clients’ facilities, analyzes the data and provides the results to them in real time. Within Providence, down time (meaning, no Internet or access to a file server, etc.) means a loss of billability across its staff of engineers.
“With automatic ISP failover,” continued Corie, “if one ISP goes down, another ISP link needs to respond to the DNS requests on the outside, so we have maximum availability to outside access. So, we purchased a Cisco ASA 5510, with the promise of dual ISP support. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the automatic WAN link failover or intelligent link load balancing that we needed, so we had to continue our quest for a better solution.”
Solution
- Internet link redundancy
