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ZeroNines Press Coverage
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Promoting Proactive Recovery
By Vince Vittore - Telephony Magazine
Telephony, April 21, 2003
The clichés are all too familiar to anyone who was in telecom before Sept. 11, 2001: While a flurry of carriers were issuing press releases about how their networks were minimally affected by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., a transformation was immediately taking hold in the industry's approach to disaster recovery.
Although most carriers offered disaster recovery services prior to Sept. 11, most were based on a reactive approach of restoring enterprise data after the fact. In the post-9-11 environment, however, many have taken a more proactive tack. ZeroNines, a Castle Rock, Colo.-based company that originally worked almost exclusively with large financial networks, has developed what it claims is an architecture that can keep data safe and up-to-date in real time.
“We designed and developed an engine that multicasts data to multiple locations at the same time,” said Alan Gin, president and CEO of ZeroNines. “In the event any node goes down, all the other nodes are active. There is no primary or secondary node.”
At the heart of ZeroNines' architecture is a switch designed to direct traffic to various servers, which results in minimal maintenance for years on end. In addition, the company uses as much of a telco's existing infrastructure as possible.
“When we initially presented this concept, the basis of SS7 is how we used to describe what we were doing,” said Keith Fukuhara, co-founder and chief technology officer of ZeroNines. “From the telco perspective, in the [central office] there is no active cost going on. Our switch that we put into the CO just runs for several years. We actually reuse clients' depreciated equipment.”
AT&T, which has created a disaster recovery team of 50 employees, already is using the architecture. The carrier has deployed NEBS-compliant servers in various locations to act as repositories for enterprise data. From a customer perspective, AT&T is marketing recovery as a standard part of every data plan. Included in those plans are what AT&T is calling FASTAR (FAST Automatic Restoration) and FASTAR II, which restore capacity lost as a result of a facility failure; Real Time Network Routing (RTNR) software that automatically routes calls across the network; and Network Disaster Recovery, which recovers the functionality of a heavily damaged or destroyed central office.
But like all new technologies in the current economic climate, carriers and vendors alike are thinking beyond the low-cost benefit to end users.
“There are third-party applications like e-mail and sales force automation that can take advantage of this architecture,” said Jake Smith, service provider marketing manager with Intel. “In a CLEC situation like what AT&T is doing, they have the capability to deploy this as part of their ultra available solution. I think people will pay a premium to enjoy high availability.”
In fact, one of the applications ZeroNines is pushing is a premium e-mail service in which users can choose the number of servers they would like to use to back up their data. “Clients are already subscribing to access services,” Gin said. “What if you're online and say, for an extra $100 or $1000 per month, all transactions that you make are multicast to multiple servers? How much is that worth to the customer?”
The company also is toying with a model in which users don't get charged until an actual recovery occurs — something ZeroNines calls a success fee. “We're trying to ask the question, ‘How can you actually monetize on the times that you save their bacon?’”
© 2003, PRIMEDIA Business Magazines & Media Inc. All rights reserved. This article is protected by United States copyright and other intellectual property laws and may not be reproduced, rewritten, distributed, redisseminated, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast, directly or indirectly, in any medium without the prior written permission of PRIMEDIA Business Corp.
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