Pros and cons of OTV for credit union disaster recovery networks

by Ongoing Operations

If you are responsible for high-end network design for your credit union and you are trying to figure out ways to build redundancy and resiliency in your branch and server network architecture, this article is for you.

OTV or Overlay Transport Virtualization is a Cisco specific technology that can be used on Nexus switches and ASR routers. The concept is to extend Layer 2 applications across multiple data centers.  Essentially, OTV will allow you to create a Data Center Interconnect (DCI) between sites so that you don’t need to change your existing network design.  Essentially, the promise of OTV is that you can deploy applications and clusters across multiple data centers and achieve high levels of resiliency.

As we look at the pros and cons we should point out that we have rarely seen any credit unions try to deploy this architecture.  We aren’t exactly sure why but in our experience with hundreds of credit unions – we haven’t seen this one very often.  That being said we think it has some positive and negative aspects for consideration and should not be taken lightly.

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