Uptime is critical for any business to succeed, especially if your customers depend on your data infrastructure to be available 100% of the time. While issues happen, redundancies in data infrastructure can mitigate the threat of downtime by some unforeseen circumstance.
Many companies in New York and New Jersey have selected C7 as their disaster recovery data center provider for colocation of their secondary data infrastructure. This article help us understand the logic behind that choice.
The Need for Disaster Recovery
It’s certainly obvious that a company needs near 100% uptime or customers will leave for a competitor who is more dependable. While hardware is dependable, the people who set it up are prone to an occasional error – human error is a major cause for downtime. Beyond the human caused disasters are natural disasters that disrupt power, cooling or network connectivity.
In 2012 hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey as a category 2 storm, causing an estimated $65 billion in damages. The storm surge flooded streets, subways and cut power and causing the data center facilities to operate off of diesel powered generators.
In one building a fuel pump for the diesel generator was installed backwards and pumped all of the fuel from the small roof-top tank to the main tank below the building, causing downtime for the data center customers due to human error.
As the flooding lasted for several days the diesel eventually ran out leaving several other data center facilities without backup power.
After the Storm abated many of these affected companies who didn’t have a disaster recovery plan began researching secondary sites for disaster recovery infrastructure fail over. At this time C7 became a popular location for these companies.
Cost Comparisons
While every company would like to have a disaster recovery secondary site, many cannot afford it. With Utah being a low power cost state, almost half of that of California and a third the cost of power in New York and New Jersey, disaster recovery colocation with C7 was affordable and has attracted many companies from both the East and West Coasts.
Additionally, connectivity in Utah is substantial given that much of the East to West Coast fiber paths run through Salt Lake City. Thus the low cost colocation and great connectivity made for an affordable, quality hosting solution.
Disaster-safe Features of C7 in Utah
Looking at disaster maps across the US, it is clear that Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Arizona are all disaster safe locations, free from the threat of hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding. While the Rocky Mountains are located through these states, earthquakes are a relatively minor threat of disaster. For instance, the fault lines through Utah pull apart and so the effect of the earthquake is low damage, whereas the fault lines in California rub against each other causing much more damage to buildings and structures.
Certainly there are many reasons to justify a secondary site for your data infrastructure with a colocation data center, and the best combination of factors has shown to be in Utah. One fact to substantiate that claim is massive NSA data center facility in Utah, which site selection underwent far more scrutiny than any company would normally have to make. In addition, it’s important to note that with politics involved there are many forces that could have pulled the facilities over to another state but the combination of factors including low cost power and disaster safe geography made Utah prevail in spite of the political clout some politicians have.
For companies whose primary site is in New Jersey or New York, a secondary site in Utah is a solid selection for a disaster recovery fail over site.
