Aliens, Earthquakes, and Zombies: A Tale of Redundancy

Author – Garrett Hill

It seems like most action movies in theaters and on TV these days have one or more of these three elements unleashing chaos on the world while the hero saves the day and gets the girl. Here at X2nSat we think about and plan for worst case scenarios every day so that you and your enterprise can rest assured that you will be able to maintain essential communications even during the Zombie Apocalypse.

“Where there is one, there is none.”

The above is a mantra you will hear from people who teach survival training and disaster preparedness. What this means is if you only have one means of starting a fire when trying to survive a freezing night in the mountains and it fails, you could be in dire trouble. The same can be said of vital communications links for hospitals, businesses, and first-responders who provide services that can mean the difference between life and death.

Each site for a hub is unique and that particular geographic location will create a distinct set of potential risks for the site to become temporarily interrupted or completely knocked-out in a more severe event. As most of you know, X2nSat is based in Petaluma, California just north of San Francisco. Hence our reference to earthquakes. This is our headquarters and our primary teleport. It would be a rare occurrence for our facility here to experience rain fade, but an earthquake of a catastrophic magnitude could happen someday. Mother Nature is funny about not following a set schedule or sending out invitations to her parties, so we do not know if it will be tomorrow or 1,000 years from now.

Related: The Fury Of the Storm: Win the Fight

Currently we have our second gateway located in Norcross, Georgia to create the necessary geographic redundancy in case we ever see the Big One here on the West Coast. While Georgia has a much quieter seismic scene, fans of The Walking Dead will tell you the woods are teeming with Zombies. Secondary hubs can be used in a few different ways. An enterprise can have all of their connectivity maintained through the primary hub and keep the secondary hub waiting in the wings in case of a temporary interruption or catastrophic failure of the online teleport.

Having a secondary hub can also allow an enterprise to share traffic loads across both hubs in a variety of ways. An enterprise could have both hubs online and configured to share traffic. Remote terminals can be allocated as needed to prefer one hub over the other as well as allow mission-critical terminals to have priority over less important terminals. This adds flexibility in addition to the critical back-up function it provides.

Going back to our survival analogy, most experts recommend people to have three different methods of starting a fire in case of an emergency. We have applied this same philosophy with our recent announcement of our third gateway in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The biggest threat to this very stable site may be the wide-open skies of the desert that always seem to attract alien visitors from another galaxy, even though Area 51 is a long way from here. This site is not prone to extreme weather events and other potential natural disasters.

Related: Las Cruces Expansion

Adding a third hub adds an additional layer of redundancy and more flexibility as to how traffic can be configured. All three sites are are geographically dispersed in such a way to provide maximum coverage of the Americas and minimize the threat of one catastrophic event impacting more than one location.

While the odds of any of these three catastrophic scenarios playing themselves out in the real-world are slim to none, there are still events that can take place on a smaller scale that could threaten the continuous operation of an individual hub. Our job here at X2nSat is to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Our geographic redundancy strategy provides the peace of mind that vital communication channels will be there when you need them the most.

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