High availability and redundancy

Downtime due to an unexpected network failure negatively impacts business operations. For some companies, some downtime is acceptable; for others, any downtime is unacceptable. Determine your uptime requirements, and ensure that your network has the resilience to meet those requirements.

Building a resilient network costs more initially, as it can include HA, cold standby spares, multiple internet circuits, premium supports contracts, and more.

High availability

HA provides resilience not only in the event of a cluster member failing, but also allows for firmware updates without any downtime. Several HA options are supported by FortiProxy: Stand-Alone, Active-Passive, and Config-Sync (Active-Active).

Assess your environment and budget to determine what options are most appropriate for your use case.

Redundant and aggregate links

Using multiple interfaces and links adds resiliency if one link fails, and increases throughput at a lower cost than using a single link with a larger throughput. For example, a 10 GB interface can be less than half the cost of a 20 GB interface.

When using multiple links to connect your FortiProxy to the LAN, asses your network for single points of failure. For example, if both links connect to a single switch, and that switch fails, then you could experience an outage. If a single FortiProxy is used in the network path, a failure on that FortiProxy would also disrupt traffic. A full mesh switching solution along with FortiProxy HA could be used so that no single link, switch, or proxy is a point of failure that could disrupt the entire network. For information on FortiSwitch architectures that can deploy such redundancy, see the FortiSwitch documentation.