My design of Internal monitoring of machines and application
availability combined with tiered paging allowed our small staff to
cover 24x7 operation, and provided for intervention and maintenance
or restarts from remote locations.
The design involved DNS
servers at geographically distant locations, hosted on different
network providers.
Daily data backups to tape and replication of
data sets to different locations provide the possibility of fast
restarts from another location in case of local damage from natural
disasters such as fire, earthquake, or regional loss of power, etc.
Design also included redundant routers, load balancers and
switches configured for active failover.