We at Xantek are pleased to announce some recent changes in our disaster fail over plan.

This plan is designed to provide survivability of your phone connections in the event of a major disaster on our end. We have always had backup service provisions, of course, but they have been manually implemented based on alarms received by our key personnel. The new disaster plan is automated and runs 24/7.

Our service depends on three critical server operations:
1. The SIP softswitch, which provides all authentication and switching for inbound and outbound calls.
2. A database server, where we store authentication, routing, and billing information.
3. A STUN server, which allows phones positioned behind NAT's to establish a path to our softswitch.
(These three servers are on three separate machines located in our primary data center outside Chicago.)

The new disaster plan monitors these three servers repeatedly, and in the event of a detected failure, reroutes all of your phones to log in on our backup softswitch, backup database server, or backup STUN server. (All of our backup servers are located in a data center in Norhtern Virginia.)

The new disaster plan relies on remote provisioning to accomplish its rerouting instructions, so it will only work on phones that have remote provisioning established. (We currently have remote provisioning available for Linksys and Yealink phones only.) Conversely, all phones that have remote provisioning set up will automatically receive automated disaster prevention.

Here is the scenario of a critical server failure:
1. The status monitor checks the status of servers every 5 minutes, so the average time to detect a failure is 2.5 minutes.
2. Upon detection of a failure, the status monitor rewrites all of the provisioning files with the new addresses.
3. Phones request provisioning information every 60 seconds, so the average time to reprovision a phone is 30 seconds.
4. At this point the phone will go through its reboot cycle; the phones will show that they are rebooting. Depending on the phone, rebooting takes anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds.
So, in most cases, it will be 3.5 to 4 minutes for the system to detect a failure and get the phones working again.

You need do nothing to take advantage of these services; they are being implemented this week on all phones which have remote provisioning. (This includes all of our business service phones, and many single user phones as well.) If you would like to add a phone to this system, it is only necessary to include remote provisioning in the phone setup. Call us if you need to get the correct entry for your phone.