Design Council

The Design Council has been championing design for more than 60 years, helping businesses to become more successful, public services to be more effi cient and designers more effective. It serves a diverse range of organisations, from small businesses to schools, helping to transform the way in which they operate.

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The Design Council is instrumental in supporting and strengthening the UK’s economy and society. It helps those that drive new ideas and new thinking, using design and creativity to generate innovative solutions to complex problems.

The Challenges

"It was time to look at our network infrastructure. We were pleased with the stable managed hosting Claranet had provided over the past four years and we wanted to update our infrastructure to support our new website. It was vital that the site could be accessed 24/7 with as little downtime as possible," said Victoria Rogers, Web Infrastructure Manager at the Design Council. The Design Council is funded by the UK Government and promotes the use of design throughout business and public services. Their complex hosting solution had to be secure, highly available and support their new website.

It was essential that the solution kept down-time to a minimum. From our experience with the Design Council we understand that it has multiple audiences, ranging from public sector organisations to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Each have different needs and purposes for accessing the site, but the availability of the site is of paramount importance. - Michael Bouguenon, Claranet's Major Corporate Consultant

The Solution

Claranet created a solution with multiple fail safes; from a backup secondary router providing redundant internet feeds to load balancing web-servers at the systems level, Claranet attempted to minimize the impact and visibility of any potential service affecting faults. "In the event of network failure the HSRP protocol provides backup through a secondary router. Several routers can be connected to the same Ethernet network and work together to present the appearance of a single 'virtual' router to the host. In the event that a router fails, hosts on the LAN are able to continue forwarding packets to a consistent IP and MAC address. This process of transferring routing responsibilities from one device to another is transparent to the user and host," explains Michael Bouguenon. At a systems level, application availability is ensured by load balancing the front-end web servers. Some load balancer implementations consider every HTTP response a sign of good health. This can even include HTTP error return codes such as ‘404', giving a false indication of uptime. It is standard practice for Claranet to monitor host integrity using HTTP ‘keep-alives'. In the case of the Design Council's hosting, this involved configuring words or phrases in an HTTP keep-alive document, ensuring that the host is not only ‘up', but that it is also functioning correctly and keeping downtime to a minimum.

The Result

Claranet built and implemented a highly available and resilient hosting solution which supports the Design Council's website, offering fast reliable access for visitors to the site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Multiple fail safes are in place to safeguard the integrity of all critical data, giving complete peace of mind that downtime will be kept to a minimum. The Design Council are able to focus on their core business leaving Claranet to deliver a high quality, professional service. http://www.design-council.org.uk/