Making Sure our Service is Always Available
Posted by Larry Bear on Tue, May 01, 2007 @ 09:20
Always is a long time ... and a strong statement. Lots can happen with power, with phone lines, with fiber connections and all. To do our best to always be available for our clients, we need redundant systems. With our new system we decided the best way to provide that redundancy is to outsource the responsibility to people whose business is providing companies with computer reliability. We chose to place our key equipment in a "co-location".
What is a co-location? Here's how our provider Another 9 describes their co-location they call the Bunker:
"The Bunker is ready for almost anything. Reinforced underground location. 24-hour security. Mandatory visitor registration with photo ID. Remote video monitoring. Pre-action fire suppression systems. Redundant power feeders."
"Our facility was built with some of the best data center-specific equipment available to ensure that our systems are stable, reliable, and thoroughly protected from bottlenecks, system failures, data loss, and downtime. The Bunker is directly connected to redundant private network access points through diverse Ethernet fiber-optic feeds. Another9 maintains direct connections to eight of the top Tier-1 backbones including UUNet, Sprint, AT&T, Qwest, Level3, GlobalCrossing, Intermedia, and Verio. By laminating the biggest backbones into a massive supernet, we ensure your servers always have a quick, efficient route to whoever is visiting your site."
It's quite a facility. We have two PRI's (T1 phone lines that also provide a lot of data about callers) connected to our Pinnacle equipment. We will have a direct connection through a T1 to our office in Great Neck. The connection with provide both data and voice paths for our operators. They will directly connect to our server in Great Neck to all of our operator stations.
All of this is happening next week. Then we can start to convert all of our accounts to the new system. It may take us three months to be able to connect all of our accounts. We'll see. We're all anxious to be able to convert all of our accounts as quickly as possible. That will allow us to focus on all the new processes we can help our Long Island and Queens clients with.
Ultimately, it's all about helping our clients solve their inbound communication problems. It's not about the equipment. It's not about our operators ... although they are first rate. All we a doing is to help our clients solve their problems. As we start the programming process, I'll describe some of the things we are doing and some of the things that we can do.