Business Continuity

An organisation needs to provide continuous availability of its data centre services for many reasons.

For some, it may be a need to provide a client experience on the internet that is both consistent and omnipresent. Round the clock trading may play a part.

For others, it may be that disruption of the business processes hosted within the data centres could cause fatal damage to the business, its clients, or both.

And, for particular markets, the influence of regulatory authorities may play a part.

For any organisation, conventional wisdom and practice is to replicate critical resources - server, storage and network, at alternative locations. Primary, secondary and, in some cases, even tertiary data centres are deployed.

Traffic between them is complex and hybrid in nature, often involving a wide range of protocols. Maintaining the availability of the optical networks between these datacentres is of strategic importance. Scalability and raw performance are pre-requisites. Routes are usually duplicated. Sometimes triplicated. Design is complex. Project management skills are tested during implementation and customer service skills are critical throughout the process.

Flexibility is key.