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QoS Systems for Disaster Recovery Support

Lifeline

Article from ADMIN 94/2026

By Tam Hanna , By Frantisek Borsik

Quality-of-service systems help prioritize scarce resources and keep critical services running with efficient bandwidth management.

After a catastrophic failure of the IT infrastructure – whether from damage to undersea cables, weather, or pilfering by copper thieves – restoring full bandwidth between the individual nodes of a network can take days or even weeks. The quality of the user experience during these emergency operations depends on how quickly applications and core services respond to requests. Efficient bandwidth and latency management is crucial for a company's disaster recovery (DR) strategy, and tools such as LibreQoS can help you allocate scarce resources and prioritize latency-critical services.

QoS Data Stream Priorities

From a user experience perspective, some packets are not as important as others. Whereas higher latency during a Windows update or when uploading an object store BLOB is not particularly critical, a 100ms delay in voice or video connections is disruptive.

As shown in Figure 1, quality-of-service (QoS) systems sit between local and global networks. Packets passing through are classified and then prioritized or throttled by applying various algorithms. Note that QoS systems do not interact with intranet packets: Prioritizing the connection between two stations located on the same network is not supported.