Issue No. 11 Page 4.

This Ain't No Disco!

Performance Technologies Inc. "Boogies On" With Non-Stop Networking

Landa June Dinner Seminar

by Barry Eames

Hey, Goat Boy! Remember the Seventies? Remember disco? (Yes, yes I know, disco sucks). But remember that non-stop, sixty-beats-per-minute rhythm and how cool you looked with all those silver lights sweeping across your white three-piece suit? Remember what a cheese ball you felt like when the music died in mid-boogey leaving you with your index finger pointing to the ceiling? "Non-stop" my foot.

Oogey Woogey, Boogey Woogey Dancin' Shoes.
Flash ahead twenty years. Instead of a disco rhythm it's now a network beat, and the biggest network of them all is the Internet. It's more frightening than platform shoes. We're totally dependent on networks of all kinds, and there's no going back - not even to the Eighties where it was warm and safe and we all drove BMW's. So now what does it mean when the music stops?

Alan Brind knows. He's Vice President of Marketing at Performance Technologies Inc., and he showed Landa members just how vulnerable we are to network failure and how we can make networks virtually non-stop using the amazing Nebula 8000 Fault Tolerant Backbone Switch.

Saturday Night Fever.
If your network is gettin' down it's a good thing. If it is goin' down it's not. Mr. Brind defined Mission Critical network failures as those with "life threatening consequences", and Business Critical failures as having "serious financial consequences". Either way, losing a network is bad news.

According to Infonetics Research, the typical large network suffers 1.76 outages per month, affecting 33% of a company's employees, and lasting over 90 minutes per outage. Financial losses can average $90 K per hour for retail operations to a staggering $6.45 M per hour for financial brokerage houses. Smaller companies don't fare any better and can easily average $193 K per month in losses. It's enough to scare the Bee Gees out of you.

Do You Love Me?
(Now That I Can Dance)
Redundancy is the usual way to guard against failures but it can be expensive, and there can still be substantial outage time as components are replaced. The Nebula 8000 Fault Tolerant Backbone Switch replaces redundant "hot" standby routers & switches through its unique Failover Architecture.

Complete fault tolerance is achieved via mirror engineering which means that no single point of hardware failure will ever bring the network infrastructure down. In the event that a module does fail it can be replaced while all 32 ports and all hosts are operational. The new module then clones its configuration from its operating partner and takes control of the network, automatically.

The Nebula 8000 Fault Tolerant Backbone Switch is the first industrial strength 100/1000 Ethernet switch to offer true fault tolerance at an affordable price. It ensures that packets get switched, not dropped. This is a premium switch and not for everyone. But for critical operations it's invaluable, and more reliable than providing redundant hardware. Add to that, a neat, concise configuration with serviceability measured in seconds, and Performance Technologies appears to have a product worth looking into.

Download their whitepaper on "Non-stop Networking" at http://www.gigabit.com or, call Alan Brind for pricing information at (716) 256-0200 ext. 279.

You must excuse me now.

I see the ghost of John Travolta carrying a paint can and I am afraid - very afraid.