Schneider Electric GIS Tech Support

We currently have a 3 server system for Responder - Data Server, Services Server, & Web Server, other than the backup power supplies, etc that normally come with a server we don't have any redundancy so if one of those servers goes down (especially the data server) during an outage we are SOL. We have nightly backups and such to bring our data server back up with but all of the calls from that outage would be gone until we could get the original server back.

What types of redundancy or backups are you doing to for your Responder systems to keep from losing the systems when you need them most?

We are using SQL 2000 (probably switching to 2005 or 2008) in 2008 and are using Responder 9.2 sp2

edit to add: Also redundancy on your license server? Without it the other three don't do much anyways.

Thanks

We don't have Responder, but we do have backup systems in case the ArcSDE server goes down. At a satellite office, we have another Oracle DB/ArcSDE set up that receives incremental updates from the main production server. If the production server goes down, we can start up the back up and use it. The main reason it's located off site is if we should lose our main service center for some reason and have to go to a back up control center.

It's not a true redundant system in the fact that there is no automatic failover (something we hope we can get budgeted for in the next year). We do have a backup license server as well. As you stated yourself, without the license manager, not much will function.

Miner and ESRI has allowed us to have duplicate copies of all our licenses for use in a production system failure at no charge, so they are pretty understanding of the issue.

That is essentially what we have setup now too. The 'problem' is that won't cover Responder unless the backup systems data essentially matches production real-time - our backup is nightly currently but could move up to hourly so any calls that come in between the backup and system failure would be lost, which could be a lot of outage calls in an hour.

We're looking at Clustered servers and using SQL's mirroring tools, but want to balance cost with benefit. The other concern is building so much redundancy/backups into it that performance is hurt.

For what reason would you want to update/replicate hourly?? We have just chosen Responder as our OMS System and are in the beginning stages of setting our processes up.

We have settled on noon and midnight for our engineering data backups so we only would loose a half day of work. But are going to use SQL mirroring (probably) to replicate the Responder tables real time. Without real time replication of your outage calls and crew activities you risk loosing an entire outage if the primary system fails.