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Working… without commercial power

Posted on February 3, 2011 by Leigh Sandy2 Comments

This ice storm hit my family harder than Hurricane Ike several years ago. During Ike, we lost power for only 8 hours with minimal disruption. This time, we lost power for almost a full day. I don’t blame Dayton Power & Light, as they are working in terrible conditions and do a fantastic job. I blame myself for being so dependent on commercial power.

There is no gas heat in my house. Thankfully, we have a wonderful wood stove. It is cold outside, so our food was moved from our refrigerator and freezer to coolers outside. But having no wifi and Internet was a major bummer for some in the house. Our smartphones and laptops worked well with a quick charge in the car, so this could have been much worse.

The roads were really not as bad as they could have been, so getting to work downtown was not too hazardous (thanks to the county and city street crews). Power (and Internet) was humming along in our data center. However, several dozens of our business customers were down for various periods (some even two days later). What could we, as an innovative service provider, do for these organizations?

First, we can inform the customers that their service is down. Early detection helps these businesses save precious time to enact their business continuity plans. If it is power, they can contact Dayton Power & Light about the outage quicker (and can possibly get a generator through a local electrician). If it is a circuit outage (copper or fiber), we can get a repair started early. This saves our customers time and money.

Second, we can offer some immediate alternatives. There are many options, like redirecting traffic to temporary servers or providing mobile access for their entire office or offering temporary space in our data center. One of our larger medical customers had a power outage for most of the business day. Their servers and fiber feed were down since their equipment rack had no power. They had the option of loading their server rack into a moving van and be up in our data center in a few hours (this was not needed since power was restored late in the day). Another customer lost their phone lines and their two Internet links. We discussed bringing one of their servers and their firewall to our data center, but the Internet links were restored within an hour of detection and repair request. Two of their phone lines were still down (but they were being repaired by his phone provider).

Third, we can help plan a strategy to reduce the impact of a power or line failure in the future. We can design solutions that prevent single points of failure on critical services. We can also host just about any application or service in our data centers downtown. We have some amazing technical experts on staff. One of our customers using our VIP for their internal servers and our Ethernet Express Metro for their access now plans to move their firewall from their office to our data center. This moves their public address into our more reliable facility along with their existing private servers (hosted in our VIP already). Only their workstations and printers will be in their office environment. Maybe some of our other business customers will move their services into our cloud after this ice storm.

If you need more precious time provided by early detection of trouble, or if you need a solution during an extneded downtime, or if you want to prevent an outage with a solid solution, then you should talk to our staff about your business needs and let us take away your headache. Contact us by email to sales@donet.com or by phone at 937-226-6896. Don’t let an ice storm take a chunk out of your bottom line.