Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Double Your Data, Double Your Confidence

We've recently added a second data center in Salt Lake City to supplement the one we already operate in Denver. In addition to doubling our capacity for remote hosting and offsite data storage, this new colocation facility lets us offer an extra layer of disaster preparedness to our clients for whom a single backup just isn't enough. In fact, Xantrion senior consultant Brian Taylor has already set that up for one of our clients, a financial services firm that wanted to be absolutely certain it could continue to operate.

Taylor spent a week in our Oakland offices setting up and testing all the hardware and software destined for the new data center and working with vendors to create a secure Internet connection between Salt Lake City and Denver. Then he and operations manager Nick Hensley installed the new equipment in Salt Lake City, with help from operations manager Christian Kelly.

"After that, replicating the client's data from Denver to Salt Lake City only took a week or so," Taylor says. "All I had to do was set up the software that compresses and copies the data, then make sure it continued to update incrementally after the initial full replication.

The financial services firm now has identical copies of its mail, file, and terminal servers, as well as all of its critical data, in two locations. Each is set to fail over to the other in the unlikely event of a significant outage at either data center. And Taylor, who's now helped to plan and set up both remote data centers, is ready to duplicate the process for any other Xantrion client that needs to keep functioning in even the worst-case scenario.