Ensuring Network Service Continuity

Project Type

Key Benefits

For a company like this one whose activity relies heavily on access to the Internet and on the capacity to find and communicate information in real time, network service continuity is more than a necessity: it is a business imperative. This is why the customer network administration decided to reinforce its infrastructure with a DHCP high availability solution to ensure the continuity of its critical network services.

Challenges Faced

Three main areas of improvement were identified in the network infrastructure and service management:

• Limiting the risk of outage coming from the fact that traditional Microsoft® DHCP servers do not offer a real high availability and failover solution. The Microsoft® 80/20 split scope can only offer a limited service in case of a server crash.
• Improving IP addresses management since the use of spreadsheets showed strong limitations in terms of real time visibility over IP allocations, error prevention and scalability.
• Centralizing IP addresses, DNS and DHCP services that were managed as three different entities with no real consistency between them, leading to high risks of misconfigurations, low management reactivity and expensive operating costs.

Solutions & Main Results

To address the above issues, the customer chose EfficientIP solutions. The Microsoft® servers were replaced by two SOLIDserver™ appliances, thus ensuring DHCP services continuity based on an active-active DHCP failover architecture and high availability hardware platforms.

Deployment and management of such architecture is fully automated and carried out in a seamless process through the SmartArchitecture™. This innovation offers a set of DNS/DHCP architecture templates that can be applied to a selection of servers. Once a model has been chosen (i.e., DHCP failover One-to-One or One-to-Many), the SmartArchitecture™ automatically configures all the servers according to their role in the architecture. Appliances and architecture management is centralized through a web-based platform that reconciles the IP addressing plan with the DNS and DHCP data. They can therefore manage its network services as a single entity, thus eliminating risks of double allocation or configuration mistakes while guaranteeing network consistency.

Finally, a third appliance is dedicated to the NetChangeIPLocator™ network discovery tool. This solution provides administrators with real-time visibility into IP address connections on the network (switch, slot, port and VLAN) and with a history of past events. It allows the network teams to monitor their infrastructure, uncover potential inconsistencies and always have an up to date IP plan in tune with current and future operations.

Thanks to EfficientIP solutions, This customer now benefits from reliable, uninterrupted and centralized IPAM, DHCP and DNS services, reaching the ever increasing level of performance required by its activity.