Product category:
Infrastructure and CAD Software
News Release from: Spoxel
Edited by the Buildingtalk Editorial
Team on 10 November 2006
Spoxel service unshaken by Hawaiian
earthquake
Document storage company, Honolulu-based Spoxel, successfully maintained all company services during Hawaii's recent earthquake
Honolulu-based Spoxel, a provider of online document storage for individuals and businesses, reports it successfully maintained all company services during Hawaii's recent earthquake The company credits the use of 'best practices' in data center management for sustaining customer data and a host of recent Internet technology advances for sustaining customer support - despite an Islands-wide 24-hour blackout
This article was originally published on Buildingtalk on 26 Mar 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Hawaiian Islands experienced a 6.7 magnitude earthquake in October 2006.
The shock knocked out power state-wide for nearly 24-hours, shutting down businesses, tourist attractions, hotels, traffic lights, restaurants and even air travel.
The quake temporarily stopped all phone communications to the U.S.mainland and crippled local service providers who did not have backup generators.
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Spoxel's online service was undisturbed and customer documents were successfully preserved because the company follows industry best practices for distributing and replicating data centers across hosting sites in multiple mainland locales.
But the company's development and support activities are clustered in the Kahala district of Honolulu, just East of Diamond Head, where the disaster hit home.
CEO John Davidson explained "Spoxel's online server farms are designed to provide security for customer data with special provisions for disaster recovery".
"But what happens during the disaster? For 24-hours a lot of Hawaiians were in the dark, but our engineering team provided development and maintenance support with what I'd call 21st century candles such as mobile broadband connections and battery operated electronics!" It took two things to re-establish control over the distant servers: Notebook PCs, used one-at-a-time for battery conservation, and high bandwidth wireless access cards to access a broadband carrier's still-operational on-island Internet trunk.
"This combination had been tested by company engineers several times in case of such disasters," said Davidson.
"Our staff attributes our success to the fact that our execution environment for the Spoxel service is all Open-Source Ruby on Rails, one of the most popular new tools for implementing today's Web 2.0 sites," added Matt White, Chief Technologist for the Company.
"Ruby is an interpretive programming language, so the source code for all the Spoxel functionality is right there on the servers, where it can be easily modified from a distance".
"It's not the same as accessing the check-in/check-out facilities of our Source Control system here at our development center, but every aspect of our trouble shooting and bug fixing came back under our control".
"Our number one goal is to make Spoxel reliable and trouble-free access document storage for personal and business documents," said CEO Davidson".
"Our job is to provide our customers stability and easy access remotely to their documents".
"I'm pleased we were able to do this in the midst of such abnormal conditions as hit our home island state".
"I suspect, had anyone known of our heroics, we would have earned a lot of Aloha from our customers around the world.".
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