How is backup and uptime of colocation arranged?

This document describes how the backup procedure of NedFox's two colocaties is arranged and how uptime is ensured.

NedFox has access to 2 physically separated colocaties, named Meppel and Dronten. Both sites are provided by Serverius. Air conditioning N+1 is arranged at both locations. Power supply is double-fed (A+B path) and is equipped with a UPS and emergency power generators in case of power outage. Surveillance is present 24/7 at both locations and (authorized) access is possible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout the year. Both buildings have taken extensive measures regarding fire safety and an automatic fire extinguishing system is installed.

System redundancy: Our database platform is mirrored from Meppel to Dronten based on Microsoft mirroring technology. The disk environments are also configured with Raid5 and Raid10, providing internal redundancy. Each disk cabinet contains 2 hot spares that take over immediately in case of a disk failure in a Raid configuration. The chance of failure within one site is therefore minimal. The underlying infrastructure is also double-cabled, with double switches and double 10G disk connections to our database platform.

In late 2019, the routing infrastructure was revised and is now fully redundant on both Meppel and Dronten.

Our cash register systems run 'locally' and only require power to function.The presence of Internet and the ability to access the RetailVista cloud is not a necessity. However, certain online applications (such as gift card balances or POS payments) will obviously not function at that time.

In Dronten, the replication of the primary database and a front office environment are located so that the cash registers can continue their interaction with our cloud in case of a loss of connection to Meppel.

Backup: We make a backup of our database platform every night. It is hosted at the secondary site (Dronten) and can be restored in case of severe emergencies. The monitoring of the backup results is performed daily by our secretariat, and once a year, a database is physically restored to an alternative site to ensure the backup is functioning properly.

The retention period for non-database data backup is 90 days. The retention period for the database backup is 60 days.

Currently, ACA-IT is conducting a study to determine if it is useful and cost-effective to take a snapshot backup every hour in order to minimize data loss between the incident and the restore in case of very severe emergencies.