Switch or router crash: How do you get the replacement unit up and running?

Planning for quickly recovering from the impact of unforeseen events is an integral part of planning for business continuity. If you are an administrator managing a large number of network devices, properly planning for disaster recovery is all the more crucial.

Crash of a switch or router in production could potentially cause disruptions in the normal functioning of the network. In some cases, it might bring down the network altogether. In such situations, Network Administrators face the uphill task of getting the replacement unit up and running at the quickest possible time.

If you are managing the configurations manually, replacing the crashed switch or router with a new device will be quite daunting. The device, with factory default settings, will have to be configured to fit into your network environment.

DeviceExpert helps achieve this task with ease. DeviceExpert’s inventory contains the configurations of all the managed devices, properly versioned. Getting the replacement unit up and running is as simple as putting a new device and pushing a particular configuration version from DeviceExpert inventory.

Henk van Achterberg, a DeviceExpert customer in The Netherlands recently explained us how easy it was to achieve this:

“Even in extreme cases of crash of a switch or router, it has become very simple to get the replacement unit up and running within minutes by pushing the latest configuration since DeviceExpert not only backs up the configurations of all devices automatically, but also stores them with proper versions and labels,” says Henk and adds that the ability to view and deploy any version on any device has helped minimize the downtime due to faulty configuration changes, which is crucial for ensuring business continuity for retailers.

With DeviceExpert in place, you need not worry about troubleshooting or disaster recovery with respect to device configurations. You can ensure network up time by taking total control of device configurations.