In the wake of Sarbanes Oxley and the corporate scandals that have graced the pages of the international press in recent years, legislative, regulatory, competitive, customer and shareholder pressures have caused many companies to re-examine their core business processes and the technology that supports them.

Natural and man made disasters have also shown many companies that their reliance upon fragile computing resources can be threatened by the unforeseen.

Business continuity, compliance and data protection have become bywords for data and networking departments and divisions.

For many organisations, the key to transactional integrity is distribution and replication of historically centralised computing resources.

For the largest companies, this will involve replication at the data centre level. Fibernet specialises in providing (and is UK market leader for) the private inter-datacentre optical networking services that make such replication possible, affordable and practical.

We are proud that our client list for such services reads like a roll call of many of the world’s very largest and most demanding organisations.

Our 5 step guide below is designed to show how Fibernet can engage with you to help you plan for and then implement the optical networking services you will need to support your own business continuity strategy.

We hope you find it helpful. If you'd like to follow up with us, please click here, let us know how to make contact, and we'll be back to you shortly.

We'll help you plan your optical network

We'll help...

1. Locate suitable premises for your backup data centre if you need them

2. Identify potential fibre routes between premises to be networked

3. Determine whether to use multiple fibre pairs or wave division multiplexing equipment and then, if appropriate; determine the best equipment to use

4. Determine pre-existing fibre routes that would help defray cost

5. Determine scope of any potential civils work and its planning implications

6. Prepare a provisional network design with a technical feasibility statement based upon the following variables

   • distance
   • optical budgets
   • the protocols you need (i.e. ESCON / FICON / Fibre channel etc)
   • the tolerances of the storage and/or processing and/or switching equipment you want to connect

7. Prepare a budgetary estimate with a provisional fibre route and timescales (subject to planning permission)

With budget approved it's time to help you design your new optical network

At this stage we'll...

1. Confirm technical design and compatibility with your servers, storage and network equipment

2. Confirm network topology and protection methods

3. Confirm network routes, fibre availability, civils work, timescales, fibre types and any potential risks

4. Confirm equipment modules, configuration, upgrade routes, availability and any potential partnerships. We'll involve specialist staff from equipment vendors as appropriate

5. We'll agree with you who is going to supply what to whom and when, and agree our role in your plan. Specifically we'll discuss how the final service will be managed and what each of us will be accountable for

6. We'll agree a commercial profile for payment that makes sense to both of us and present all of this information in a fully costed proposal. If you agree to our proposal we'll proceed to contact

Once we've agreed contracts we'll start to implement your network

Now's when the action begins

Every project is very different. We'd like to reassure you that our project managers are 'Prince 2' trained, that our processes are ISO9001:2000 approved and that we have executed many projects of this type before.

You can look forward to:

1. Professional project management and regular project reviews

2. Our civils teams will by now have identified planning permission required, have posted relevant planning notices (exercising our telecoms code powers where we need to) and we will be managing rights of way, building entry and construction work with your landlord

3. Equipment will have been ordered and usually we'll deliver it all to an agreed single location so that we can jointly test it in one place prior to deployment at its final locations

4. We'll undertake any civils work (digs) needed and make good after putting the fibre ducts in place. We'll 'blow' fibres of an appropriate specification through the ducts and splice it with any fibres on existing routes that we may be using. We'll honour the planning obligations that our code powers infer as well as any local planning regulations

5. We'll test your new fibre routes with our optical test equipment to determine that the optical budget we promised you has been met or exceeded

6. We'll put the equipment into its final permanent location, connect it to the new fibres and test it. We'll arrange any network management connections from our network management centre to the new equipment and test them. Finally we'll work with you as you connect your data centre equipment to the new network to test it to ensure that our service is functioning as you would expect

7. Assuming everything has gone to plan we'll ask you to sign off the new service against criteria we both agreed beforehand.

With your service live it's time to think about management

So what can you expect?

1. Every contract for service will have as a core component a service level agreement. Every one is unique. It's not unusual for them to stipulate very high levels of service availability and where this is the case we will have both agreed a design that we know can deliver the goods

2. Where we are managing the equipment, you can expect a proactive monitoring service 24x7x365 from our dual network operations centres. You can expect appropriately skilled engineers to be despatched to site in the event of alerts that require manual intervention within response times we have pre-agreed

3. You can expect us to manage equipment faults, bugs, upgrades, maintenance and replacement if necessary. You decide what you need based upon your own skills and abilities – we fit in to fill the gaps

4. You may have asked for service performance reports and statistics and where this is the case we will collate and deliver them to you – perhaps via our customer extranet (It's called TANet Now)

5. You might also have asked for your management systems to be connected to ours. When this is the case we will have agreed who responds to what kind of alerts

6. You can also, of course, expect us to look after the fibres. Our civils teams are again ready to respond 24x7x365, within response times we have agreed in your SLA

It's working now, but can we improve the service?

A regular part of any optical services contract is the formal service level review. Its a meeting between your team and ours, the purpose of which is not only to review performance, agreeing corrective actions where necessary, but also to discuss future plans on both sides.

The optical Wave Division Multiplexing technologies we deploy are very flexible. Most projects are initially cost justified on the basis of mitigating the impact of service failure or non-availability of major processing and storage systems. Once these core capabilities are deployed, gigabit Ethernet or SDH services for example, can often be justified and deployed against a very low incremental cost, in very short timescales.

These service level reviews are important. Fibernet prides itself on exceptional service – a conviction supported by our close to 100% renewal rate of managed service contracts.

Your investment in these services is significant. Our goal is to reward that investment with extraordinary service.

We hope that you have found our 5 step guide both interesting and useful. If you'd like to follow up with us, please click here, let us know how to make contact, and we'll be back to you shortly.