2008 7search adwords africain application bandwidth bladesystem bond center connection database dedicated driver ecommerce edition email findout fresh Funny gigabit gmail google HELP hosting hp imap iscsi keyword mailbox managed miva mpio multipath network oil performance pop3 position protocol quota recovery searchfeed server shared SMTP unlimited virtual web windows yahoo

What is Cisco Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP)

When deploying high quality hosting, there are several ways of ensuring continuous connectivity in case of single failure. It is very common to deploy multiple connection with two or more Cisco switches with STP (Cisco spanning tree protocol). However this deployment requires hosting hardware to support multi card bonding. High end systems will always offer STP but you may find HSRP deployed by itself in lower priced hosting companies without the STP that would require hardware and software support. With HSRP only deployment, your connection is locally connected on a network that contains two or more cisco switches. With HSRP-only deployment, your conenction and immediate hub or switch is a sigle point of failure but further down the stream you will find HSRP master and slave. Usually the master assumes gateway IP address and the slave is a standby.

When failure occurs on master, slave will assume the gateway IP address so as long as your local connection is running, you should always be able to connect further on into the network. For higher quality hosting, demand that HSRP is extensively deployed WITH not INSTEAD of STP. With STP your server will have two independent connections to two independent switches so if one fails you will be still working through the other switch.

More info:

permanent link to article http://freecash.hogger.net/what_is_cisco_hot_standby_routing_protocol_hsrp