BrokerageAmerica's IT manager, Simon Janason, remotely manages and maintains BrokerageAmerica's servers and networking devices at the Internap site from the firm's headquarters in Manhattan. "I connect to the collo and our other sites as if I'm sitting there at the desktop, for example," Janason says. He uses mainly SolarWinds Software's SolarWinds tool for network monitoring and the freebie Virtual Network Computing tool for remotely managing servers and desktops.
The firm's old data center, meanwhile, was an IT pro's worst nightmare: worn-out wiring and archaic, shared T1 multiplexers sitting in the bowels of a building that had been plagued by outages. When a telco technician bumped into one of the muxes in 2003, he inadvertently knocked out the building's T1s, including BrokerageAmerica's WAN. "It was indicative of the problem with that building," Martinez recalls. "There was no backup power.
"Although BrokerageAmerica immediately began moving its critical network devices and servers to the collocation facility, the move was slow, hampered by budget constraints and limited IT staff (see "The Hard Sell,").
Expansion PlansThe next step for BrokerageAmerica will be to enable the remote offices in Boston, San Francisco and Red Bank to run independently in the event of a future disaster. If the firm's network or the Internap site goes down, the remote sites can access trading and back-office apps from a backup data center. These sites house mostly sales operations, though Red Bank is adding some trading and accounting operations as well. The branch sites rely on the Internap data center for their critical applications--Red Bank and Boston connect to it over point-to-point T1s and a VPN connection; the small San Francisco office uses a VPN connection.
The Red Bank backup site requires Brokerage-America to buy mirrored servers, Cisco switches and routers, desktop machines and point-to-point circuits, says Janason. BrokerageAmerica estimates that such a site would cost $2 million.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
