Remote RAID/Mirror

[curtiss]

I am trying to gather as much information as possible on mirroring web servers. Does anyone have any good references I can check out?

At some point within the next year, we will most likely be re-vamping our web server, and I will be recommending that we set up multiple servers in multiple locations, in order to prevent data loss and/or downtime in the event of a catastrophe.

Obviously, I will need to provide information as to why we would want to do so, as well as information on how to do so. If anyone can provide me with any good references on remote server mirroring, etc. I would really appreciate it.

[Allen]

For me, I have seen many companies go all out when it's not necessary. At my former employer, we had a nice server farm and so forth but it was needed.

Are you hosting locally now curtiss or with a web host?

[curtiss]

We are hosting locally. We had an issue about a month or so ago where we lost a lot of important documents because our file server went down. It was down for almost an entire week, and when it was restored, it was restored from an old backup. Thankfully it was a file server and not the web or intranet server, but the possibility of our web server going down became all too real at that point.

Since I have no control over the personnel in the networking/server department, the only thing I can do to try to ensure nothing like that ever happens with the web server is to get the hardware set up properly to avoid problems like that. Being a college, we are the type of organization that will need to communicate through our web site in the event of a catastrophe. If, God forbid, the campus were to be blown up, or the server room were to burn to the ground, we would need to be able to communicate our crisis management plan through our web site.

I have considered recommending that we go with a remote, hosted server altogether, but, once again, at that point, I would have absolutely no control over how our information was protected and safeguarded.

[Allen]

Curtiss - we used akamai at work - they were very reliable and most of the world's leading companies use them.

They can mirror your site practically anywhere in the world. We chose 3 US locations and one international.

[curtiss]

I am trying to weigh our options at this point, so I'm looking for more information.

Has anyone come across any white papers weighing the pros and cons of remote vs. in-house web servers? I need to try to get my ducks in a row in order to figure out whether we really need to host the server in-house or not. Any resources on the subject would be greatly appreciated.