Fault Management
Introduction
Fault Management is one of the five network management categories defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO). The goal of Fault Management is to monitor and detect anomalous conditions on the network and, if a fault occurs, restore the network to a normal condition as rapidly as possible. A good Fault Management policy should be able to resolve a majority of network faults without human intervention. You will utilize a local network that consists of six LANs with a total of 60 users. The users need to access the network database server and the network web server via a DS1 connection to the ISP. If that DS1 link should go down, the company employees will lose the ability to access the network. In addition, it is suspected that the DS1 link is being over-utilized and is causing database query response times and HTTP page response times to be slow. The Fault Management solution is to implement a redundant DS1 which will act as a backup for the primary DS1. This implementation alone, however, would not increase response times. Therefore, we will implement load balancing along with the redundant DS1 solution such that if either DS1 goes down, the other can take over, but during normal operations they will share the network load. With this solution we will have redundancy with load balancing and, as a result, response times for network services should improve. Explanation and BackgroundWhen a serious fault occurs in the network, it usually means that a mission critical link or device has gone down. This could result in network outages and user downtime. When this is the case, the company will lose money in any of several ways. First, the network outage may be causing your clients to be unable to access goods and service that you profit from. Another reason is that employees may not be able to perform their jobs during the network outage because they cannot access the network resources that they…