Unless organisations who have suffered performance problems evidence to their customers that they have taken precautions to mitigate against future outages, revenue and margin will erode. It could take years to regain trust and lost customers. In order to avoid future outages, the obvious place to start – for me – is the infrastructure.

If you are a network manager or architect, ask yourself the following questions:

• What will the impact be to my business in the event of a fibre cut, power outage or other service failure?
• Can I afford to wait for fault repair times, typically 6 to 24 hours before my service is restored?
• Does the peace of mind and resilient power of a diverse network far outweigh the additional cost?

Having diverse and redundant infrastructure for your network will reduce the risk of your website or applications being unavailable.

Outages also dent companies’, especially start-ups, confidence with ‘cloud’ services.  These certainly become much cloudier when companies cannot place or accept orders. It has to be the responsibility of companies utilising cloud services to ensure that their host provides adequate and suitable diversity both in terms of the network and its platform.

If you are in the online or gaming industry, just imagine what could happen if your customers cannot place bets for a major event, such as the Grand National or key football matches…

To be continued.

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Though geographical network diversity is often sought (and procured) in order to provide certainty of performance, it is by no means the end of the story. Power is one essential piece of the network puzzle and unless as much attention is paid to it and its resilience and reliability as every other fundamental network infrastructure element, risk of failure is increased. 

This is never more true than in the media sector, where the efficient delivery of media assets (i.e. the content) – the contribution and distribution of the content that we consume – is the industry’s lifeblood. Outages cause damage to brands, affect advertising revenues and have a generally negative impact on the confidence of the consumers themselves.

In today’s increasingly schedule-free world, people want immediate access to content as and when they demand it, and patience wears thin if the technology doesn’t deliver.

Now, luckily for all of us, engineers are, by their very nature, problem solvers. Networks tend to be looked after by brilliant men and women who frequently rise to meet the challenge of avoiding network failures, be they caused by power outages, cable cuts, equipment malfunction or other points of failure.

However, as the old adage goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and the brilliance of these people will be of little consequence, if the infrastructures they are attempting to maintain and fix are old and creaking, or not fully redundant at every level.  

The focus on networks and the physical infrastructures that support them is only set to increase. Those with the freshest and most up to date essential elements that are truly redundant at every level will find their performance flourishing, and those attempting to run 21^st century broadcast content over 20^th century technology will most certainly feel the strain.

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This year Geo Networks will be exhibiting at the annual event being held at Olympia in London. Click here to register and visit us on stand F68. Keep up to date on Twitter by following @datacentreworld.

Geo’s Will Pitt will be attending the event, held at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. Click here to register.

Commenting on her new role, Nash said: “Influenced by regulatory controls, a shift in trading methods and the need to reduce costs and power consumption, there has been a growing interest among the financial services sector to invest in advanced network infrastructures. Key to this is the need for business continuity, security and low latency. As the leading provider of dedicated fibre networks, Geo is well placed to capitalise on this and I am delighted to be joining the company at this exciting time.”

Geo Networks Limited (“Geo”), a leading provider of dedicated fibre networks, today announced the completion of a 25 year deal with high-integrity data centre specialist, Ark Continuity Limited (“Ark”), to deploy diverse fibre connectivity to Ark’s Spring Park data centre campus in Wiltshire.

The 13.5 kilometre (km) of new network infrastructure has been delivered to Spring Park, which will provide 93,000 square metres of data centre and office accommodation to national and local businesses. The new fibre optic network, which connects Spring Park to Geo’s 3,000km national backbone and enables direct access to Ireland, will provide diverse routes for the virtual elimination of network downtime.

The diverse route will enable Ark to sell low latency fibre capacity onward, to heavy users of data including service providers and enterprise businesses, as well as extending Geo’s reach to the Wiltshire location for its existing and new customers. Additionally, with eight sub ducts now installed, each to carry 96 pairs of fibre, should a customer stipulate the use of an alternative carrier, that carrier can quickly and easily procure fibre from Geo to sell on and manage on behalf of its customers.

Steve Webb, Chief Operating Officer at Ark said, “Ark’s philosophy of continuously delivering high integrity data centres built on security and availability without compromising sustainability is at the core of everything we do. We are enormously excited about our Data Centre propositions, which offer customers the choice of Bespoke, Tailored or Standard solutions to meet their exact requirements. Whichever option is selected, they will receive mission critical infrastructures, including reliable and secure connectivity, ready to meet tomorrow’s needs today. We were recommended to Geo on the basis of its delivery history and strength of network; we know that Geo fibre will guarantee speed and security for our customers.”

“This strategic deal highlights a very important extension of our network into yet another high-profile data centre”, said Chris Smedley, Chief Executive at Geo. “We are well-placed to meet Ark’s long term requirements to satisfy demanding end-user needs, and we are very much looking forward to continuing our work with Ark over the coming years.”