Ever experienced an unexpected power outage just before an important meeting with a client? Or your team had a critical deadline to meet exactly when your Internet went down for hours? This may have caused you lots of unnecessary problems and you and your business most probably ended up losing money and precious time.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the past months, Mladost district has been affected by unexpected electricity downtime without prior notice from the national electrical company on multiple occasions. Yet, all companies at Campus X experienced no disruption to their operations.
Why? Because we go far and beyond to secure full redundancy for our community. From redundant water and power supply (backed by our UPS system and diesel generator) to enterprise-grade IT redundancy. Meet Campus X’s award-winning IT Manager Sergei Biliarski, who explains why all this is key for your company’s success:
What is IT redundancy and why is it important?
The only good downtime is no downtime. According to data provided by Gartner, the average hourly cost of network downtime amounts to well over $300K per hour or $5,600 per minute.
That’s why IT and power redundancy are business-critical for organizations’ uninterrupted business continuity both when operating from an office space or in a work from home environment in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In these turbulent times we currently find ourselves in, some employees are forced to work from home, whether they like it or not.
Standard home Internet connectivity and plans, as well as home-grade Wi-Fi routers, however, are simply not designed to support the needs of a modern remote worker – HD video calls, download and upload of large files, streaming high-quality content, etc. If you add to that mix one or several kids and their online learning challenges, the strain we put on our home networks makes it impossible for them to be reliable. Not to mention the times when the service simply goes down for an unknown period of time right when you need to hop on that important Zoom call.
What makes Campus X stand out when it comes to redundancy?
Campus X’s award-winning network infrastructure by Cisco Meraki is designed with redundancy in its core. Two high-speed fiber routers connect us to the Internet using separate physical paths so that even if emergency street construction work cuts off the wrong pipe, we’re safe.
All critical devices are doubled and configured in High Availability, meaning that even if one appliance goes down, nobody (except IT) will know. Aggregated symmetric bandwidth of 1+ Gbps ensures that everybody gets enough speed and low latency for seamless calls, downloads, and streams.
Another thing, which makes us stand out, is that it’s all automatic. We’ve removed the human factor from the equation. If one of the providers fails, our routers will switch over to the backup. If one of the devices fails, the other will seamlessly take over. And the best part is that automation doesn’t care if it’s peak office hours or 3 AM on a Sunday morning.
Tell us a bit about the High Availability and Disaster Recovery technologies at Campus X. How did you implement them and what are their major benefits to the community?
Network downtime always has a direct impact on the business and should be avoided at all costs.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery technologies prevent the network from having a single point of failure at the edge and allows for fast, automatic recovery in the event of device failure, reducing the negative impact on member services.
The biggest benefits here are that in the event of hardware failure, network downtime will be either brought to a minimum or eliminated entirely depending on the scale of the disaster.
No manual intervention by the network administration team will be required to facilitate recovery from a hardware failure. We achieve this by doubling the required wiring and by configuring the so-called “warm spare” devices, identical to the primary ones. They are always awake and alert and diligently wait for their moment of glory to step in and save the day!
Hear it from the community
Andrew Andreev, Engineering Lead at our member company OfficeRnD explains why IT redundancy is important to his work:
“It's extremely important for us to have access to all critical systems 24/7 hence maintaining continuity of IT services at our workplace is something we can barely live without.
Most of our colleagues (all departments actually) depend on IT services in order to do their work.
Having a service become unavailable means stopping important company activities and processes. In these cases, we highly value Campus X's high availability of IT services as it helps us prevent faults. The matter becomes even more important if we add the danger of data loss to the overall picture. We need to be extremely cautious of unexpected outages as they might lead to situations from which it is difficult to recover.”
Commenting on the benefits of Campus X’s IT redundancy and services, he adds:
“The most obvious benefit would be uninterrupted service to all of our 700+ customers. Another thing, not a lot of people consider, is that it allows us to be better positioned in terms of reputation and reliability compared to our competition and maintain the necessary standards required by our larger customers.
We have used different office providers in the past but none of them comes close to the security and reliability provided by Campus X and its team. Personally, I can say that watching the whole neighborhood blackout and you still being able to finish your work is a great advantage.
Also, quite a few times we have seen how the backup internet provider kicks in and saves the day when the primary one goes out. Actually, I think IT redundancy should be among the first things a company looks for when choosing a new ‘home’.”
Want to work in a safe, inspiring, and fully redundant office? Take a look and try us for free now
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