Industry – Financial Sector
Challenge – Considering the critical nature of the organisation’s operations, the intention of Nexim Bank was to mitigate the challenges to maintaining consistent data across the organization by creating a disaster recovery site for site replication. This is because data loss was becoming a growing concern to Nexim Bank. The implementation gives the organisation several benefits as follows:
- Improved reliability and availability: If one system go down due to faulty hardware, malware attack, or any other problem, the data can be accessed from a different site.
- Improved network performance: Having the same data in multiple locations can lower data access latency, since required data can be retrieved closer to where the transaction was executed.
- Increased data analytics support: Replicating data to a data warehouse empowers distributed analytics teams to work on common projects for business intelligence.
Selection Criteria-
The criteria taken into consideration to support data replication generally included the advantages of Low latency, Minimal packet loss, Flow control mechanisms, Network resiliency and Scalable bandwidth
Data replication requires in-order packet delivery, latency tolerances in the handful of milliseconds (one-thousandth of a second) range, data rates per communication link near 1G or 2Gbit/sec., and network path redundancy. Restoration times in the event of a device failure on the transport path are under 50 milliseconds.
Result- Layer3 successfully deployed a high performance Secured VPN solution to NEXIM (Calabar) branch office with redundancy using juniper network next generation firewall gateway device.
The aim of this deployment was to provide a replication site for NEXIM HQ Resources for disaster recovery purposes while ensuring an accurate backup existed at all times in case of a catastrophe, hardware failure, or a system breach where data could be compromised.
The Redundancy solution comprises of Juniper products which includes:
- SRX300 (Firewall):
SRX300 VRRP Redundancy
The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) enables NEXIM Bank to form virtual routers from groups of physical routers on their local area network (LAN). These virtual routing platforms (master and backup pairs) provided redundancy in case of hardware failure.
VRRP also allows NEXIM Bank to easily configure a virtual router as the default gateway to all hosts and avoids the single point of failure of a physical router.
VRRP Setup
One master (Node0) and one backup (Node1) routing platform of SRX devices were used for this implementation. Both the Master and Backup share same virtual IP address on redundant interfaces. For each device, the address configured in the virtual-address statements differs from the addresses configured in the address statement for members of the redundant interfaces. Each security zone (RSERVER, CAL-LAN and VPN) has redundancy on the VRRP configured.
