Department of Redundancy Department

Or… What is High Availability and why do we need it?

No one wants to admit it, but equipment fails. Sometimes its due to power failure (sometimes due to that whoops factor) and sometimes a piece of equipment just stops working. When I was in high school, my electronics teacher told us that all electronics runs on smoke. When the smoke comes out it stops working. All joking aside, what happens when equipment fails during your mission critical streaming session? The show stops… completely...

That’s why equipment redundancy is critically important for your events, productions, meetings, and conventions. A properly built network will have redundant firewalls, network switches, and other network appliances in what is called a High Availability Cluster. In this configuration two (or more) network devices are joined together to act as one, with a heartbeat exchanged between them. If one of the devices stops responding the other immediately begins processing network traffic. This keeps your network up even with equipment failure.

When we deploy a network for a production, event, convention, or meeting all the core equipment is deployed in a High Availability mode where the failure of any piece of equipment will not cause the network to fail. We always bring spare equipment so the failed device can be quickly replaced. This is all part of the Location Connect service.