American Red Cross

Regional Disaster Coordination Center (RDCC)

The Regional Disaster Coordination Center is a state-of-the-art facility, located in the Fairfax headquarters of the American Red Cross of the National Capital Region. It serves as a coordination and communication hub in the event of a local or regional disaster.

The Challenge

In order to effectively serve the community the RDCC must remain online even during local disasters.  Already built to sustain extended power outages, the final hurdle was ensuring network availability.

Among the greatest concerns was the interruption of service from an ISP.  The Chapter had two distinct ISPs but needed a way of effectively using both, and automatically failing over should one fail.

The Solution

After determining their existing equipment was not able to perform in this role the Chapter engaged Paisley Systems for their experience in advanced networking.  A Frontdoor Firewall Appliance was implemented in order to satisfy the Chapter's requirements.

The Frontdoor Firewall Appliance has the unique ability to use up to three service providers in parallel.  It also meets their requirements for access control, bandwidth monitoring, and auditing.

How it works

The Frontdoor routes outbound traffic to the two ISPs in a "round robin" fashion.  Each new route is directed to the next provider in the list of providers which are currently available.  This provides a basic load balancing effect between the providers.

Every three minutes the providers are tested for availability.  Should a provider fail this test:

• It is removed from the list of available providers.
• It's routes are removed from the routing table of the Frontdoor.
• An email is sent to the IT department notifying them of the outage.

Once the provider becomes available, it will be reincorporated into the routing scheme.  Traffic will then flow between all the available providers.