If you’ve ever been an IT manager for a small business network, you’re aware of one simple fact: small and medium business (SMB) networks are generally something of a mess. Typically, they’re organically grown and built off of consumer-class hardware. Network management tools are usually non-existent, documentation is erratic, and redundancy is totally absent. The end result is that the typical SMB network is a virtual fireball, with the network admin running around carrying a pail and trying to extinguish the fires.
What tends to happen, eventually, is that one of these outages becomes damaging enough to cause management to demand a better infrastructure. There’s always a catch, however, and in most cases it’s money. Luckily, you can build a highly reliable network without breaking the bank, as long as you focus on eliminating high-impact, single points of failure.
In this article, I’ll explain how to create a highly available SMB network. In order to be as vendor-neutral as possible, I will try to avoid specific technologies, and will instead lay out some goals, along with common methods for meeting those goals. For similar reasons, I will not detail exact costs, but where possible, I’ll give you relative costs. Finally, I won’t include virtualization options in this article, and will instead focus on standard client-server infrastructures. While virtualization can allow for very highly available infrastructures, a fully virtualized infrastructure is beyond the grasp of most small to medium sized businesses.
