‘Tis the season…for generosity, cheer, and…apparently…massive data center outages (ok, ok: it’s always the season for massive data center outages). Are you prepared for the worst? Your outside plant cabling is, well, outside…as a result, it’s vulnerable. Let’s face it: stuff happens. Take a British cloud hosting company’s recent perils on December 13th: they suffered an outage at the hands of human error. What happened? One of their workers accidentally cut a main cable connecting to their facility…with a pickaxe. Yes, a pickaxe.
Lawrence Jones, UKFast CEO, is quoted as having said, “We have a team of engineers on site and they are on hand to ensure any problems are fixed. We have 40,000 servers across five data centres. When a server loses power, even for a split second, it can damage the hard drive. If necessary, we’ll be working through the night to ensure that if any data is lost, it will be restored.”
40,000 servers and five data centers….oh, my. Can you imagine being one of the workers or the manager who has to deal with this kind of disaster? Scrambling to figure out what’s been impacted, and where, must be the headache of the century (especially when the clock is ticking and the phone is ringing off the hook from a slew of distressed customers).
At Graphical Networks, we get it. We’re in the business of helping our customers keep track of their assets and cabling and we understand that managing your fiber backbone, even under the best of circumstances, is a struggle. You can’t manage what you don’t know, and when you’re dealing with miles and miles of cabling, you’re in a whole lot of trouble if you don’t have a decent management solution in place.
Our existing DCIM customers asked us for a way to keep track of their outside plant connections and assets: we delivered with netTerrain OSP. With netTerrain OSP, our customers get GIS-enabled outside and inside plant management rolled into one tool. With this in place, customers improve the utilization of their connections, they streamline capacity planning, and speed up both troubleshooting and time-to-deploy.
End-to-end connections can be quickly deployed, the exact locations of each connection segment and element can be pinpointed, and our search functions allow our users to find any attributes in mere seconds. netTerrain OSP offers 6 decimal precision for exact latitude and longitude positioning, along with 19 zoom levels that let users drill down from the world view to the street/block level.
Bottom line? Next time a worker wielding a pickaxe comes your way, be prepared. If you have a solution like netTerrain OSP in place, you can quickly trace the outage and see everything that’s been impacted (end-to-end).