SOLUTIONS

Alternate Routing

High availability is crucial for government networks serving military, emergency, law enforcement, and public facing applications. This means avoiding single points of failure as far as possible, including the network links. Ideally, there should be alternate paths between critical sites over different phsyical networks types, for example, one fiber and one copper. Indeed, many government departments have extensive copper infrastructure that they can recruit for one of the alternate paths, and Actelis’ ML series of Ethernet Access Devices (EADs) are ideally suited to the purpose. The fact that the ML systems are themselves resilient against threats to service continuity such as lightning strikes, or even just mutual interference among copper pairs within a binder, enhances overall availability. Usually, Ethernet LANs at each end of a link are connected to two alternate paths via routers or switches, with one link going out over the copper infrastructure via a point-to-point ML system, such as the ML130. The other link might be fiber-optic or wireless. It is also important that the switches themselves are fully resilient, with dupication of vulnetrable components such as power supplies and fans, or else they would constitute single points of failure, as can be seen from the diagram.