Disaster Recovery Is Now a Service

It’s one of those days that’s warm, too warm. The skies are darkening and its eerily quiet. It’s the kind of day when bad things can happen quickly. You don’t have to wait long. The skies quickly darken, the wind picks up and there is a roaring noise that grows louder by the moment. The next sound you hear is the storm sirens going off all over town. You run for cover in the basement storage area where you are protected. Up above, windows shatter and you can hear the wrenching sound of metal being ripped from the roof and sides of the building. Then the chaos dies down and it’s quiet again. You go up the stairs and open the door to see...

What you see is a landscape littered with debris to the horizon. That includes what little is left of your business. File cabinets, computers, server racks, desks and what used to be office walls are strewn in all directions. You spent a decade going into business and a half hour going out of business. Is it even possible to pick up the pieces and keep going?

Every year many long established businesses face this scenario or one of equal consequence. The utter destruction of sudden unexpected disaster knocks them out of business so hard that they just can’t put it back together again. Without some sort of disaster planning, all that critical business information on hard drives, CD-ROM backups, as paper files in thin metal file cabinets and cardboard storage boxes can be annihilated right before your eyes. You have no order records, you have no customers lists, you have no written procedures, you have no tax files, you have no proprietary drawings. Years, even decades of writing, drawing, entering data, making notes and carefully organizing it all vanishes. Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes of digital data representing the sum total of your business knowledge is smashed beyond retrieval. Worse, the cost and time involved in putting it all back in place are too much to bear. It’s time to pack it in.

Does any of that send a shudder up your spine? It should. Unless you’ve put bulletproof disaster recovery processes in place you are vulnerable. At this point it’s just a matter of time before the worst happens. The good fortune that’s smiled upon you up till now might not be there tomorrow... and there’s no way to know when that tomorrow will be. Doesn’t it make a lot of sense to take control now and put measures in place that can ensure the continuity of your business?

The advent of the cloud is creating some opportunities for disaster prevention and recovery that were hard to do previously. For instance, you know that you need copies of everything critical to your business stored in at least two places. Your computer hard drive and the desk drawer with the backup disks isn’t even close to adequate. Smaller companies may choose to have a safe or storage room for backup materials. Larger operations can afford a second data center across town. In the event of a massive tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flood or fire that devastates an entire city, neither business is protected. They are both wiped out because the disaster claims their primary and backup data.

The nice thing about the cloud is that you can pick a cloud that is located far away. It’s unlikely that any man made or natural disaster is going to wipe out geographically separated data centers at the same time. Certainly it makes sense to backup your electronic data to the cloud, but what if you could replicate your entire electronic operation in the cloud?

This is the service that Windstream is offering with their Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). The idea is to replicate your physical and virtual servers in the Windstream cloud. It’s not just a place to go and get new IT resources to replace what you’ve lost. This is a system that shadows your data center operations on a continuous basis. In effect you have a real business operating in-house and a virtual copy running in the cloud. They operate in parallel until something happens that puts your local operation out of commission. Then you pick-up where you left off using the cloud copy of your business. Once you get re-established locally, you sync your new data center with the cloud and your are back in business as if nothing ever happened.

Would you sleep better knowing that your business is protected by a mirror image in the cloud? If this sound like that type of service that you would find valuable, then check out cost and features of disaster recovery as a service for your particular business. It’s the continuity insurance that no paper insurance policy can provide.




Note: Photo of tornado destruction courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

EarthLink Means Business With 10 GigE Fiber

Most of us remember EarthLink from land rush days of the Internet when anyone and everyone just had to get on the net now, and dial-up 56K service was the best you could get. EarthLink is still a viable ISP for consumers with both dial-up and broadband access available. But there’s another side to this famous company. EarthLink Business is a facilities-based competitive carrier serving everything from SMB to enterprise needs with over 28,000 miles of fiber installed and more in the works. They’re in the process of installing two new 10 Gigabit Ethernet fiber rings in Ohio and Eastern Pennsylvania. There’s also a new high speed fiber route going in between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

What’s with all the new high-bandwidth construction by EarthLink and others? In case you haven’t heard, business is automating like crazy and heading to the cloud. The enduring slowdown in economic expansion has given corporations a chance to re-examine their operations and re-engineer for what they’ll need in the future. One thing they’ve found is that office automation can be as big an enabler of employee productivity as the factory automation of decades past. That means more computers, more processing and more communication between business sites, vendors, customers and remote employees. Any business that has outsourced overseas has found that a key to making this work efficiently is to tie together the far flung operations as if they were right next door. You can’t do that physically, of course, but you can do it virtually if you have the right networking.

The cloud is also seen as a game changer in a world where it’s hard to predict what resources you’ll need next season or even next month. Traditional in-house data center construction is a capital and time intensive approach. If what you are doing will run just as well in a remote data center, you gain the advantages of avoiding capital investments and buying what you need by the moment with the knowledge that additional resources are always available when you need to scale up. Scaling up is the expected path as a company grows over the years. Now you have the option to scale up and scale down as business fluctuates so you never have idle resources running up expenses.

The one thing that process automation, outsourcing and cloud operations have in common is that they are bandwidth intensive. That bandwidth was fairly easy to come by when everything was on your local network. Now you need the same big conduit going between cities, across the country and perhaps overseas.

SONET is the proven core network technology for fiber optic WAN networks. You can certainly run legacy OC3, OC12 and OC 48 fiber optic connections for your business connectivity. But today it’s Ethernet services that are hot. No problem. Ethernet runs over SONET just fine. In fact, many advertised Ethernet fiber optic networks are really running SONET at their core. OC-192 is a good match for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, with a special WAN-PHY protocol designed especially to transport 10 GigE on a OC-192 optical carrier.

EarthLink is expanding their nationwide fiber network and their suite of business telecom services that include MPLS networking, full and fractional DS3, EVDO 3G wireless, SIP trunking and Metro Fiber Ethernet. They added three new data centers in Rochester, NY, Marlborough, MA and Columbia, SC with 10 Gigabit fiber rings connecting each location to the network backbone. Such high bandwidth connections allows them to offer real time data replication and cloud services to interested companies.

Is your business re-engineering for higher productivity and more agile operations? If so, you may benefit from some of the new cloud services and high bandwidth network connections that have become recently available. Even your current operations can cut costs while retaining the same performance with competitive telecom services.

Low Latency Fiber Routes To Europe and Asia

Many US companies have offices in the UK and Europe. Multinational companies have their operations located worldwide. So, how do you reliably interconnect all of your international business locations including connections to the cloud?

More and more, the answer is low latency fiber routes. Low latency is a term you hardly ever use to hear. It became part of the user vernacular with the switch from circuit switched phone service to VoIP. Before that, latency was a derogatory word used to describe the big delay experienced when communicating through geosynchronous satellite links. Now all the major carriers are touting their new low latency fiber routes to Europe or Asia.

So why the big change? Aren’t fiber routes inherently low latency?

Indeed, most fiber optic connections have latencies in the tens of milliseconds or less. That’s enough to ignore for most purposes. Notable exceptions are high speed financial trading, data replication and some cloud services.

Don’t confuse bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth, often referred to a line speed, is how fast you are sending out ones and zeros. This may be limited to the capability of the terminal equipment at either end or, more often, the capacity of the line. You can connect Gigabit Ethernet routers to each end of a T1 line but your packets will transfer no faster than 1.5 Mbps. That’s the T1 line speed.

Latency is a different animal. It describes the time it takes for those ones and zeros to get from one end of the line to the other. Often latency is quoted as the time in milliseconds for a round trip from source to destination and back to source.

Here’s how latency rears its ugly head. Say you are trying to carry on a conversation with someone using VoIP on a connection that has several hundred milliseconds of latency. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not uncommon on the Internet. The two way conversation quickly becomes like using a walkie-talkie. You talk one at a time and then pause for second before you speak when the other person is done. If not, you find yourself talking at the same time, but stepping on each other’s conversations.

More to the point of fiber optic latency, say you and someone else are trading stocks using automated programs. If your algorithms both decide there is a buy opportunity at the exact same moment, they’ll each place a buy order of a certain size based on the price action they are detecting. What happens if your order reaches the exchange 10 or 15 milliseconds after your competitor? It’s entirely possible that they’ll get a better price because the market moved between the trades.

This is what is getting “quant” traders exercised over latency and why there is a substantial market for the lowest latency connections possible. Carriers can reduce the latency of their fiber optic routes by taking the shortest path possible between two locations and minimizing the amount of equipment in that path. Every switch, router and multiplexer takes a small amount of time to do its job. Add them all up and you’ve increased latency.

Ultimately, the speed of light through the glass fiber is the limiting factor. That’s why shorter paths are lower latency. For the ultimate in latency reduction, you want to colocate in the same facility that houses the exchange computers or very near by. In high speed trading, even microseconds now count.

Latency was never that much of a problem when the bulk of traffic was one-way data file transfers. They get there when they get there and TCP/IP makes sure they arrive intact. It’s also no big deal for one-way audio and video streams or downloads. You just have a slight delay before the program starts. You probably won’t notice latency because there is a much larger delay built-in to buffer for jitter caused by congestion and packets taking different paths through the network. Two-way voice (VoIP) and video (teleconferencing and telepresence) are definitely affected by latency, although not to the same extent as financial trading and other very latency sensitive processes.

Does your company need higher performance network links to be more effective? You’ll do well to review the cost/benefit tradeoffs of low latency fiber optic networks, MPLS networks and other options available for your business locations.



Note: World map image courtesy of NOAA on Wikimedia Commons.

Even Lower Latency Connections To Chicago

If you’ve been wondering just how important network latency has become, note that AboveNet is installing shorter fiber optic routes just to link Chicago and its suburbs. That network will be in operation by mid-next year. Can other cities be far behind?

Latency is the new bandwidth. It’s the scarce resource when you need really, really high performance in your computing environment. Who needs such performance? The big driver has been financial companies that trade on the stock and commodity exchanges. That’s why Chicago, as a major financial center, is being targeted for the AboveNet buildout. New York is another hotbed of activity, with colocation near financial exchanges in high demand. Since we are in a global trading economy, low latency connections to Europe and Asia are also enjoying enormous growth.

Why the need for speed, and why doesn’t more bandwidth solve this problem? Latency and bandwidth are two different animals. Latency is how long it takes a packet to get from point A to point B if there is no interference from other traffic. Bandwidth is the sheer volume of traffic you can handle before packets start piling up at the choke points.

To someone with a too-small WAN network, it might seem that latency and bandwidth are the same thing. That’s because a bandwidth-limited system slows down transmission a lot more than the effect of latency. But once you have enough bandwidth to keep up with the amount of traffic you can actually send and receive, then the network is going as fast as it can. Increasing bandwidth won’t make those packets fly down the line any faster. They’re inherently limited by the speed of light and electrical delays within the circuitry.

You get a dramatic feel for the effect of latency when you watch those television interviews from locations thousands of miles away. They connect to the studio using microwave trucks that beam the signal to a geostationary satellite 22,236 miles above the equator. The signal goes from the truck 22,236 miles up to the satellite and then comes back down 22,236 miles to the television studio. That’s a quarter of a second delay one way or about half a second for a conversation at a minimum. You find it either comical or annoying to listen to the reporters at both locations tripping on each other.

How do you reduce that latency? Take as much equipment out of the path as possible and make the path as straight a line connection as possible. Not much you can do with a geosynchronous satellite. They only work at that altitude. Just don’t try to use one for VoIP telephony or any sort of interactive process or you’ll get frustrated quickly. Fiber optic cables are the high bandwidth connection of choice, but even they are not created equal. Some networks, like the Internet, may take a circuitous route to get packets from one location to another. The Internet was designed to get the packets delivered even under multiple fault conditions. It wasn’t designed to get them delivered particularly fast.

What’s better? Privately run fiber optic networks, like national and international MPLS networks, do a decent job. Even these are designed for normal business requirements and aren’t optimized for minimal latency. What you need are networks specifically designed to minimize latency. They feature very straight runs from location to location, very few switches or routers on the path, and termination as close to the users as possible.

High frequency trading has highlighted the need for low latency networks, but as business moves more and more into the cloud, other processes will drive their own needs for this level of performance. Disk mirroring and data replication are two applications that already benefit from lower latency connections. Cloud computing over multiple locations could easily have the same requirement.

Are your business processes latency sensitive? If so, you should seriously consider the newer low latency network services offered by AboveNet and other competitive carriers. There are microseconds, even milliseconds to be saved.