"Telkom itself has a mature business continuity strategy that caters for all eventualities, including the worst case, when you need an alternative site far away where you can restart your business."
There are compelling reasons why Cybernest's six data centres are located where they are: high availability, seamless failover and geographical separation, all critical components of a sound business continuity strategy.
As the map shows, Cybernest has four data centres in Gauteng and two in Bellville in the Western Cape. It is no coincidence that Bellville 1 and Bellville 2 are on the same campus, in close proximity of each other. The same goes for the two Centurion data centres, Centurion 1 and Centurion 2, which are also next to each other.
This proximity supports high availability and seamless failover between the two adjacent centres through very high speed low latency connectivity. Each facility operates independently from its twin, with separate environmental systems, backup and network access connectivity for instant failover.
The Hartebeeshoek data centre in the Magaliesburg, which is used mostly for disaster recovery, also provides extended high availability with the two Centurion centres. The distances between Centurion and Hartebeeshoek are far enough to be used for disaster recovery, while still being close enough to support high availability architectures like server metro-clustering and synchronous storage replication.
Cross-over failover, or enhanced disaster recovery protection, is available between any of the Gauteng data centres and Bellville facilities. Asynchronous storage replication, server geo clustering or traditional tape-based backup and restore can be used between the Centurion and Bellville facilities to build these enhanced solutions, says Althon Beukes, Executive: Infrastructure Operations.
"How far you choose to go with your business continuity strategy boils down to your risk appetite. Telkom itself has a mature business continuity strategy that caters for all eventualities, including the worst case, when you need an alternative site far away where you can restart your business. Whatever a customer's risk appetite, we have a solution to match it," he says.
"Further to this, a very key statistic gleaned from international research highlights the importance of having implemented an effective business continuity strategy; namely that 93% of companies that lost their data centre for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of that disaster!"
Indications are that Cybernest may further extend its data centre footprint - or "cloud", as acting Managing Director Pierre Marais puts it. "People talk about software as a cloud without realising that you need infrastructure and platforms to make up the cloud. The managed VPN cloud connects to the data centre, which means that if you're already a Telkom VPN customer, it's very easy to seamlessly connect to any Cybernest data centre."
But customers are under no pressure to use managed connectivity from Telkom, he emphasises. "We are service provider agnostic, allowing access to all network and data centre providers. You can bring in whatever network you want to use."
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