By Jay Atkinson
AIS Network CEO
Can the AIS Network data center reliably maintain data availability when a massive storm hits? Yes!
Last night, the Washington, DC, metropolitan area suffered a massive, highly destructive storm replete with high winds, thunder, lightning and heavy rains. This afternoon, more than 1.3 million households and businesses across the area are still without power. In fact, power company officials are predicting a “multi-day outage.” All this bad news comes in the middle of a heat wave when weather forecasters are calling for dangerous heat levels and still more storms. We sympathize with those who are still without power and who have suffered property loss.
Last night”s storm, which crippled many businesses with a primary utility power outage, underscores why it”s tremendously advantageous to host your mission critical data in an SSAE 16 Type II-compliant data center. Outages are costly. Customers don”t really care if there was a storm, an earthquake, a rolling blackout or some other issue responsible for an outage. They simply expect perfect availability of and connectivity to their data, and that is understandable.
Reliable, redundant power and redundant IP connectivity are two of the most important safeguards that a managed hosting provider can offer its customers, especially when a natural disaster strikes. Yet, what many hosting providers offer falls short of that. AIS Network”s Tier III data center in Virginia came through with flying colors and kept our customers” data up and running.
No hiccups, just solid availability.
Choosing to move your mission critical applications and data from a casino online on-premise hosted environment to a fully managed hosted environment within a secure data center definitely makes good economic sense but it”s also a decision that provides for more reliable protection against power and Internet connection outages. That”s a critical value proposition.
Managed hosting support systems must be predictably available, and system availability is only as predictable as the availability of power to those systems. When you host your data in AISN”s data center, you are choosing to add a level of built-in redundancy for failover protection during common and extreme conditions. AISN facilities are designed for redundancy and high availability of power to our clients’ critical server systems, and high density Internet connections. Clearly, to build this sort of environment for your data on-premise would be cost-prohibitive.
Some data centers promise redundant/ backup systems, but nonetheless, it”s still very important for a prospective customer to confirm precisely what that promise entails. In some cases, a physical inspection may be necessary or advisable. If you”d like to learn more about AISN’s data centers or take a technical tour, please contact us.