| By E.B. Flanagan, VARBusiness
March 2, 2001
When the power shuts off, no one cares why--they just want
the lights back on. So while blackout-ridden California's
politicians, regulators and engineers are busy pointing their
fingers, businesses are left in the dark to find their own
solutions to immediate problems.
But for Don Ursem, vice president of network operations at
San Francisco-based VocalPoint Technologies, thorough planning
and a solid partnership helped his business survive a blackout
unscathed.
VocalPoint provides middleware, infrastructure and the services
needed to voice-enable HTML and XML content, allowing a company
to create access to any of its Internet and intranet applications
and data over a phone.
To offer the ASP product, last August VocalPoint contracted
Intira, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based netsourcing provider, to
foster a strategic relationship. Both sides knew that voice-based
applications have little or no tolerance for downtime. Even
the slightest disruptions could cause a much larger crash
of the entire system.
Sure enough, in late January, Intira was hit with a blackout
as part of California's rolling outages. The backup storage,
redundancy and data-mirroring put into place from the beginning
kept the systems up and running long enough for Intira's generators
to kick in, according to John Steenson, Intira's CTO. The
generators were able to support the entire data center and,
in turn, support all of Intira's clients, including VocalPoint's
voice portal, until the outages were serviced and power was
restored.
|
