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A very busy morning for the Microarea headquarters. The Genoese head office came under sharp attack...no, not by Assagne (he has got nothing to do!) but rather by water, an element found in nature that is precious and essential for life, that nevertheless can cause serious damage if spilled where it should not be.
by Fabrizio Perricone
Product Marketing Manager
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A dull and insignificant connection pipe, belonging to one of the many fan-coils found within the company building (useful indeed for the offices heating up during the cold winters and cooling during the boiling summers), pulled out from its original position causing a major break-down (lasting several hours) of the company's activities and operations.
What happened exactly? The water that was intended for the thermo convector poured everywhere instead! Over ten offices, found on the three levels of the building, were literally overwhelmed by water. As most of you can imagine, the electronic equipment found within the Microarea premises was "unhappy" to say the least of this unscheduled event. The Microarea website remained unreachable up until mid-morning, time in which the situation started to turn back to normal thanks to the effort and work put into practice by the Microarea personnel.
Microarea, in order to ensure an ongoing availability of the essential services, provides a constantly active validation back-up service for Mago.net on servers that are external to the Microarea structure. Such service has allowed (during the blackout period) 765 users to validate their Mago.net and work as though nothing ever happened.
To say the truth, there has been a small number of situations (less than ten) in which it has been necessary to modify the firewall of the end user in order to accept the replies coming from the domain microarea.eu (this latter domain is home to the back-up validation service) as well as microarea.it.
This short video can help you realise what the situation was like in the Microarea offices at 9.00 am, 9th of December 2010.
What happened has offered the possibility of verifying the quality and effectiveness of the disaster recovery systems utilised currently by Microarea. This experience has also been able to underline the importance of improving communication in such a way to be safe from the effects of a catastrophic event.
Considering the fact that the technological infrastructure is a vital factor towards ensuring a full and ongoing service, Microarea is taking into consideration a collaboration with Amazon.com (company holding a consistent number of server farm and cloud services that are available from all over the world) in order to reach a top level safety with systems fault-tolerant at 99.99999%.
You will be duly informed by Microarea when the new backup service will be all set.
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