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Hi I am looking for some advice and best practices for the contingency plan of our Fibre Link data connection between Offices and the Warehouse which is approximately 100 metres away over a river but technically still on the same site.

I will outline our setup:

Both Domain Controllers are in our offices and devices in the WH rely on the Fibre Link to talk to the logon Server and provide connectivity for all services DNS/DHCP/Internet/SQL/Fileserver shares etc.

Computers / Devices in the Warehouse include:

  1. 24 Port Netgear Smart Switch assigned IP 10.0.0.50 (8Port POE Switch also connected for the Access points)
  2. 7x PC’s on DHCP
  3. 1x SQL Mirror Replication Server
  4. Large Multi-Function Photo Copier that prints all of the Picking Lists / Dispatch Notes / Product Instructions
  5. A few other Network Printers
  6. 5x POE Wireless Access points with reserved static IPs
  7. 4x Wireless Barcode Scanners with Static IP’s that connect via the AP’s (USB Scanners to fallback on in the event of the Wireless network/Scanners being unavailable)

There is actually 2 working fibre links, so if one fails we have the other, but if both fail / get cut or whatever we currently do not have a proper contingency plan in place.

We are still able to print all documentation and do the processing in the Office as a last resort.

We were proposing to purchase a router with USB/SIM 3G/4G Modem Support, to provide internet access which should at least allow at the minimum PCs to each login locally connect via VPN and grant Application and SQL connectivity for the Warehouse Management Package and Despatching Software.

But if the Warehouse Switch is assigned an IP of 10.0.0.50 configured for our network and then the fibre link is disconnected, what happens if this is then plugged directly in to a router? I assume this router should be configured as a DHCP Server? What other configuration will be required for the router and switch?

Should there also be a need to promote the SQL Mirror server to a Domain Controller?

What other alternatives would be easy to implement to maintain as much service level as possible?

Thanks in advance

Rld
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1 Answers1

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Do you have line-of-sight between the buildings? Why not implement a wireless link using something like 2 Ubiquiti Nanostation 5 (NSM5) devices. If you're ok with manually swapping over to the wireless link thats an option but it would be best to have smarter switches (Layer3) which allow you to assign a priority/cost to the links (Fibre v wireless) so you can have automated failover. You should also implement monitoring so if the ports that the fibre connections are connected to go down that an alert is sent to investigate why - this is just so you're not working off the wireless link for months without knowing that there's a problem with the fibre. Are the fibre connections configured using link aggregation where the two connections are paired to form a higher bandwidth connection? If you create two links between two switches without link aggregation (known as EtherChannel on Cisco switches) or the use of spanning tree protocol you could introduce the problem of a loop on the network.

Evolutionise
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