Network Cloning

[cjd]

Network nerds (and maybe Voipfone customers) may be interested in what we've done/are doing to harden our network. Here's a quote from an idiot:

Colin Duffy, CEO of iNet Telecoms (Voipfone’s parent company), said “Most of our competitors have a single point of failure called their data centre. If anything happened to that data centre – loss of power, a fire or a terrorist bomb incident – service would be lost, possibly for months, maybe forever. We decided that that wasn’t a fair risk for our customers to take so we made the decision to build a state of the art, fully matrixed and cloned telephony platform and to house the second platform in an out-of London location. The end result of this build is to have two independently operating and physically separate platforms fully co-operating with each other in real time. If one fails, the other accepts the load without any downtime or manual intervention. The new Bunker network isn’t just a back-up; it’s an integral part of a single, virtual operating platform that can survive the loss of its identical twin in London – and vice versa.”

“So finding a second data centre within easy reach of our London data centre that met our stringent physical and digital security requirements, as well as providing the high performance network we needed, was a real challenge. But after researching and visiting many data centres the final decision to choose The Bunker was an easy one to make.”

http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?C=4&ID=473842

It's actually been - and is still being - a difficult technical challenge. Plus it's expensive and brings no benefit except total continuity of service if the worst happens.

btw - The Bunker is a really interesting place - it's a old nuclear bunker 30m below ground.

http://www.thebunker.net/about/

 

[KM-Tiger]

It's actually been - and is still being - a difficult technical challenge. Plus it's expensive and brings no benefit except total continuity of service if the worst happens.

Thanks for that cjd, interesting from both a technical and business perspective.

 

[cjd]

Thanks for that cjd, interesting from both a technical and business perspective.

Yes, it is. The technology is pretty much bleeding edge - or rather the integration of technologies and networks is and the engineers are like kids on Christmas day.

My main concern is the business side, I'm looking at an A3 chart I drew up in 2004 that was what I thought we'd have to do to have a long term sustainable business. This is one of the few big investments we have left on that plan. It breaks my heart though because it's a hellova cost - we've literally doubled our asset and maintenance costs to provide the same service.

I only hope that when people are looking at buying a phone service, that as well as checking prices, look at whether their provider is thinking of things like this. (Fat chance ;-).

 

[nikcolaus]

It is very interesting issue.Thank you for sharing. This is a very interesting business perspective. Hope technological world will develop.