Pros/Cons Dual Best Effort ISP vs Fiber/MPLS.
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As some of you saw in my other thread, I'm looking at solutions that involve bringing in more than one ISP to allow for some redundancy, and major cost savings.
For those following along from the other thread - I currently have 3 remote locations (ok technically 4, but we are leaving the 4th one alone). All three of those locations are being closed and consolidated to a brand new location. The old locations were only occupied at best 50% of the time and best effort was good enough. If an outage happened we could easily reschedule those appointments for another time.
Our new consolidated location will be open 90% of the time (M-F 8-5) and as such I'm providing offerings and suggestions that we have a better solution than our remote sites had previously.
Currently I have a 10Mb/10MB Fiber (dual ring, not over provisioned, etc, highly available internet connection) that I pay roughly $880/month for. If I up that by $6, to $886 and sign a 5 year contract I can get that bumped to 20/20.
We have been at 10/10 for around 2 years, before that we were at 6/6 for 4 years, and before that we were at 3/3 for 2 years.
Today I can get 50/10 best effort cable modem service for $180/month and 12/2 (only option at the best effort level at this location) for $130/month.
For my new location, the pricing would be roughly the same, though the second provider can provide service of at least 100/100 for $256/month if I wanted.
Pricing
Main location
Fiber today $880/month
Dual ISPs tomorrow $310/month
Savings $570/monthNew locations
Internet at three locations $270/month
Dual ISPs tomorrow at new location $310/month
Additional cost $40/monthJust to add confusion to the mix, a last min entry has come in,
Fiber based MPLS/internet to both locations 20/20 for $550ea site/monthHere are the pros and cons of each that I came up with.
**Fiber **
**Pro **
single connection, nothing complex on the firewallCons
Expensive
Single ISP connection, if they have a catastrophic failure, we could still have downtime**Dual ISPs **
**Pro **
Significantly less expensive
if one carrier goes down, other carrier should not be affected, and we stay online though at reduced capacityCons
More complex firewall setup
Best Effort connections tend to have more outages from personal experienceFiber/MPLS
Pros
Less expensive than old fiber
MPLS provides private WAN link between location, no VPN required
Single connection, firewall setup simplierCons
Single connection, if ISP has failure, internet it offline
More expensive than dual Best EffortsWhat other Pros/Cons would you add and where would you add them?
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@Dashrender said:
What other Pros/Cons would you add and where would you add them?
We use cable, big con is upload speed. Forget about doing cloud stuff at all, it's terrible.
For reference: ~100 users on 100/5
Edit: zero complaints about 100 down, it's rare to see it spike above 75% utilization over any significant amount of time.
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@MattSpeller said:
@Dashrender said:
What other Pros/Cons would you add and where would you add them?
We use cable, big con is upload speed. Forget about doing cloud stuff at all, it's terrible.
For reference: ~100 users on 100/5
Edit: zero complaints about 100 down, it's rare to see it spike above 75% utilization over any significant amount of time.
Considering we're living on a 10/10, and really not complaining, but I do restrict things like streaming media, etc.
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To make sure I understand... your 3 branches are merging with your main branch?
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@dafyre said:
To make sure I understand... your 3 branches are merging with your main branch?
No,
The three branches are merging into a new remote location, same city.So my city will now have 2 locations instead of 4.
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Currently my uploading is of medium importance as we upload a fair PDFs to our EHR.
So much so that assuming we move to the dual ISP solution and are limited to the 12/2 for failover situations, we'll be instituting a policy of no uploading while our primary ISP connection is down.
With any luck though, we'll be dumping most of the need for this uploading soon, and even that problem will go away.
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@MattSpeller said:
We use cable, big con is upload speed. Forget about doing cloud stuff at all, it's terrible.>
You should be able to do things like O365 with that connection pretty well, unless you do a lot of uploading of files to ODfB, etc...
Other cloud services where you have to send a lot of data might not work, but I'm trying to think of a general time that might be the case?
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@Dashrender So you can get 100/100 at your primary branch from company 2, as well as 100/100 at your secondary branch from company 2?
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@Dashrender said:
Other cloud services where you have to send a lot of data might not work, but I'm trying to think of a general time that might be the case?
For us, YMMV:
Dropbox
Google drive
Uploading video to youtube
remotely managing other sites
sending data between sites
backups to the cloud (totally impossible unless we got a way sexier connection, I'm not sure 100/100 would cut it)
.... other stuff as I think of it -
LOL
Backups to the cloud are something I never understood unless you have tiny amounts of data or your daily new amount of data was next to nothing.
But just as bad, in the case of failure, how are you suppose to get back online? It would take days or more to download all of the data back in most cases, and that's assuming you left the connection alone for nothing but that.As for the rest - Google Drive/Dropbox, etc assuming you're dealiing with traditional office files, that shouldn't be HUGE deal... but sure, it'll be slow.
Youtube, ok yeah, just forget that!
You have a hard time remotely managing sites? I have 3 site to site VPNs and 78 users using a web based EHR and I can still do remote management easily with my 10 megs up.
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@Dashrender we deal with TB's of video, it's horrendous some days.
Imagine your typical rugby pitch, now surround it with cameras recording 1080P, allow to stew for several hours.
I have users with desks full of HDD's. It's not pretty.
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@Dashrender said:
But just as bad, in the case of failure, how are you suppose to get back online? It would take days or more to download all of the data back in most cases, and that's assuming you left the connection alone for nothing but that.
We will call this problems that seem obvious when you are at a company with a 10Mb/s WAN. Lots of companies, certainly not all, have huge pipes and can restore systems really quickly. Lots of even homes now are starting to get 1Gb/s. Think about how fast a restore could be for critical systems over 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s. In many cases, companies with good WANs have faster WAN links thatn @mattspeller has LAN speed!!
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Also, consider that lots of people have one of these two situations:
- Backups are for restoring data but they can be functionally back online long before data is restored.
- Restores will go to another site, like online, so restores could potentially be 10Gb/s LAN restores even when done in the cloud.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Think about how fast a restore could be for critical systems over 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s. In many cases, companies with good WANs have faster WAN links thatn @mattspeller has LAN speed!!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
But just as bad, in the case of failure, how are you suppose to get back online? It would take days or more to download all of the data back in most cases, and that's assuming you left the connection alone for nothing but that.
We will call this problems that seem obvious when you are at a company with a 10Mb/s WAN. Lots of companies, certainly not all, have huge pipes and can restore systems really quickly. Lots of even homes now are starting to get 1Gb/s. Think about how fast a restore could be for critical systems over 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s. In many cases, companies with good WANs have faster WAN links thatn @mattspeller has LAN speed!!
The last company I interviewed at had backups from AppAssure replicated to a second location (they have 16) plus to the cloud. As well as the SANs replicated between two locations and backuped to Azure. Cloud backups when planned properly seems to be a good alternative (much better) than keeping tape or harddrives off site in a vault.
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And another thing about cloud backups.... if you move from Snowflake management to DevOps, restores can be in minutes. Only small amounts of data might need to be brought in from the cloud. DevOps models can make backups 1% of the size that they traditionally are for many shops.
As an example, MangoLassi is 14GB to restore a system image. Less than 1GB to restore the data. Only the data needs to be restored to get the community back up and running. 1GB doesn't take long to restore even over 10Mb/s and nothing over the 10Gb/s that we have.
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Think about how fast a restore could be for critical systems over 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s. In many cases, companies with good WANs have faster WAN links thatn @mattspeller has LAN speed!!
I'm right there with you, Seeing that other thread today where 1 Gb was $399/month.. Man I'd do that in a heart beat here! I'd let users do whatever they heck they wanted online.. lol
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
But just as bad, in the case of failure, how are you suppose to get back online? It would take days or more to download all of the data back in most cases, and that's assuming you left the connection alone for nothing but that.
We will call this problems that seem obvious when you are at a company with a 10Mb/s WAN. Lots of companies, certainly not all, have huge pipes and can restore systems really quickly. Lots of even homes now are starting to get 1Gb/s. Think about how fast a restore could be for critical systems over 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s. In many cases, companies with good WANs have faster WAN links thatn @mattspeller has LAN speed!!
The last company I interviewed at had backups from AppAssure replicated to a second location (they have 16) plus to the cloud. As well as the SANs replicated between two locations and backuped to Azure. Cloud backups when planned properly seems to be a good alternative (much better) than keeping tape or harddrives off site in a vault.
Sure, if you have 100Mb+ internet connection.
Granted I'm behind the times because I was worried about outages, but I'm working to solve that now, so soon I could see myself having 5 to 10 time the bandwidth I have now.
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Can you get 100/100 to both Offices in your city? or only one of them?
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@scottalanmiller said:
And another thing about cloud backups.... if you move from Snowflake management to DevOps, restores can be in minutes. Only small amounts of data might need to be brought in from the cloud. DevOps models can make backups 1% of the size that they traditionally are for many shops.
As an example, MangoLassi is 14GB to restore a system image. Less than 1GB to restore the data. Only the data needs to be restored to get the community back up and running. 1GB doesn't take long to restore even over 10Mb/s and nothing over the 10Gb/s that we have.
You have 10 Gb to the internet?
