Am I the only one who thought full network redundancy meant buying two of everything?

For years, I built our branch office setups with two firewalls, two core switches, and two ISP links, thinking that was the gold standard for uptime. The tipping point came during a planned failover test in our Austin location last quarter. We cut over to the backup firewall, but our VoIP phones still dropped for 45 seconds. It turned out our single, overloaded DHCP server was the real single point of failure, a box I'd completely ignored because it wasn't a 'network' device in my mind. That moment made me see that true resilience is about the entire service path, not just the shiny gear with blinking lights. I was so focused on the expensive hardware checklist that I missed the basic services holding it all together. Now my design reviews start with tracing the actual user experience from login to app. Has anyone else had a similar wake-up call about a hidden dependency killing your redundancy plan?

2 comments

2 Comments

skyler_baker1mo ago

How many times have we all done that? You get so focused on the big ticket items that the simple stuff slips through. That DHCP story is a perfect example of a single point of failure you never see coming.

ellis.nina1mo ago

But it's just DHCP, how bad could it really get?