A macro-scale cyclone referred to as a Nor’easter is forecasted to develop along the East Coast starting tonight and estimated to continue throughout Tuesday. In addition to typical storm preparations, have you ensured your data is also ready for Storm Stella?
Although we cannot assist you directly with storm preparations (water bottles, canned foods, batteries, candles, backup generators, blankets…etc) we will always ensure the integrity and reliability of our Web services. Since 2001, we’ve been committed to providing a high level of uptime during all types of conditions including storms, even Nor’easters. All of which comes down to: redundancy, resiliency, compliance, geographic load balancing, great data security, and 24/7 monitoring, contributing to our 99.999% availability of service offerings with one of the industry’s only financially backed service level agreement. We take great pride in our system performance and are the only public web-service provider confident enough to openly publish our performance reports.
To ensure you are fully prepared for this storm in particular, it is important to note that our primary and backup data centers are in separate geographic locations. If an emergency occurs, you can re-point your application from our production data center to our backup data center.
The failover data center is designed to increase the availability of our web services in the event of a network or routing issue. Our primary data center hostname is: sws.serviceobjects.com and our backup data center hostname is swsbackup.serviceobjects.com.
You can also abstract the actual hostname into a configuration file, in order to simplify the process of changing hostnames in an emergency. Even in the case where your application handles failover logic properly, an easy-to-change hostname would allow your application to bypass a downed data center completely, and process transactions more quickly.
For most clients, simply updating their application to use our backup data center hostname should immediately restore connectivity. Your existing DOTS license key is already permitted to use our backup data center and no further actions should be needed.
Many of our clients with mission critical business applications take this action of configuring for failover in their application. We are available 24/7 to help with best practices and recommendations if you need any assistance before, during or after the storm!
