[Gllug] Geographcial server failover

[Darren Beale]

Hello

I'm a bit out of my depth and would like some advice please.

Later this year my company will be launching a web service that will
be collecting data 24/7 and which needs to be available 100% (or near
as poss) of the time. Local clustering and availability is well
covered in the plenty of documentation and books out there. However
when it comes to balancing across geographically separate locations
when one location goes down, the other picks up ALL of the requests,
then this is not covered in as much detail, if at all.

Any sort of scripting or round robin DNS does not sound like it'll cut
it, there is going to be some lost data that way. What I'm looking for
is a way for requests to foo.bar.com to switch from one machine in a
datacentre in - say - Redbus Docklands, to another identical server in
a Glos or Manchester centre if the first one goes down.

Apparently it's possible to get a decent ISP (that has feeds going
into different centres) to  monitor the machines and if the primary
goes down, switch the routing to another identical machine elsewhere
(with the same IP) by means of BGP.

I guess i'm asking for a sanity check here before I pick up the phone
to someone like Claranet ( any recommendations?) I'd also appreciate
knowing in advance what something like this is going to cost me, quite
a bit I'd imagine.

thanks

Darren
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