In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, many areas of the North American East Coast were hit with massive storms and power outages. As record-breaking storm surges and heavy rains flooded cities, millions of homes and businesses have lost power and may be without electricity for days.
When natural disasters strike like this, it reinforces why we set up precautions to guard against natural disasters. SLI Systems has built various redundancies into our service to protect our customers’ search and navigation, so that in the event that a server or data center fails, the load will automatically be redirected to another location.
We were fortunate that our data center in New Jersey remained in-tact and our servers continued to function fully throughout the storm. Even with redundant power supplies and back-up generators, sometimes a data center goes off line. If that did happen what would happen to our services? Well, for customers, they would continue to see normal, uninterrupted service.
We have servers in eight data centers located around the world and multiple servers in each data center to help process the billions of queries conducted through SLI’s services. If there is an issue that shuts down a data center, our system will automatically divert all traffic to different geographic locations. If the issue occurs within one server, a load balancer will automatically remove that server from service,. In this way, we provide multiple layers of protection against our servers failing so that your business is safe.
Additionally, our solution is multi-homed, which means that our clients are duplicated on multiple servers in multiple data centers. If there is an internet connection issue between a specific user and one of the data centers, the user’s browser will ignore the address of the faulty connection and use one that is working.
We’ve taken the steps to have multiple servers in multiple geographic locations with multiple hardware, network, and DNS providers so that our search functionality will operate without a hitch, regardless of where a failure might occur. It is during moments like these, even where there was no failure, where we’re glad we took the necessary steps to ensure undisrupted service for our customers.
If you have more questions about SLI Systems redundant architecture, please feel free to reach out to us.
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