Your UPTIME is as only as resilient as your Data Center provider.  Ida Provided the Ultimate Test. Did We Choose Wisely?

A Direct LTx Customer Perspective, from Scott Burkhardt, Director of Client & Business Partnering at Keynet

Chances are more and more of your business is online and the damage from downtime would be more significant than ever. An uncomfortable truth is that avoiding outages and maintaining the uptime you need is often completely out of your hands; it is in the hands of your service providers.

When Uptime is Everything:  At KeyNet part of the value we add is not only the quality of services delivered but also the quality of the providers and carriers utilized for service delivery on behalf of our clients.  KeyNet’s client partners view us as a trustworthy partner and collaborator delivering SMBs strategic IT and cybersecurity solutions and practices with a level of quality and sophistication of those found at Fortune 500 companies.  Client partners trust KeyNet with their uptime. 

President of KeyNet Technologies Kevin Eisenberger explains, “during the selection of critical third-party vendors, KeyNet scrutinizes each provider, selecting the right providers for the services we offer.  This is a great advantage to our clients.”  

KeyNet’s clients understood that approach conceptually but never has doing business with the right people been more important than when the remnants of Hurricane Ida struck Pennsylvania with a fury on August 31 and September 1, 2021, spawning tornadoes and massive flooding.    

Risk Reduction:  KeyNet Technologies IT infrastructure, and by extension, KeyNet client partners’ IT infrastructure was well protected at Direct LTx, a colocation data center in Reading, PA.  One of the reasons KeyNet selected Direct LTx was the quality of the data center.  It is positioned over 80 feet above both the 100-year and 500-year flood plains and four generators on-site are poised to mitigate utility power loss.   The Direct LTx data center is a former electrical company facility, so its access to power and resiliency is impressive.   KeyNet found it difficult to envision a circumstance where Direct LTx’s data center could flood or have a catastrophic loss of power.   All these factors combined made Direct LTx the clear leader and choice in risk mitigation and avoidance of downtime for KeyNet. 

ISP Providers Down Hard:  ISP providers throughout the region were not as well situated as Direct LTx and flooding in downtown Philadelphia led to some hard outages in the days following the storm.   As described by Kevin Eisenberger, “On Thursday morning, early, our monitoring systems alerted us of an outage with our primary ISP.   We executed our failover strategy to our backup provider.”  KeyNet’s emergency failover strategy worked; however, service was now on an island with our secondary ISP solution.  We were just learning that our primary ISP in Philadelphia was under three feet of water and there was no timeline for recovery.

Bad Luck Leads to Precarious Position:  That evening KeyNet’s backup provider experienced an outage resulting from a fiber cut, unrelated to Hurricane Ida.  The backup ISP provided a diverse route and a diverse carrier location, key to a strategic decision by KeyNet for diversity and resiliency.  For their respectable uptime record to be severely impacted at this critical juncture by an unrelated incident was a worst-case scenario for all involved.

While standard new circuit install timeframes from other providers were 45 to 60 days, the impact of the storm pushed many of those providers out to 90 days for a new circuit install.

The outage of both providers required KeyNet to look at all options to return services to production in order to continue supporting our client partners’ needs and business operations.   We were tapping all their resources and weren’t getting good answers.  Kevin explains, “as part of that process, we asked Direct LTx if they had any contacts that could help us get connected since both of our providers were experiencing an outage.” 

A Labor Day Miracle:  In a sea of “no we can’t” Direct LTx delivered a “yes we can.”   

Instead of 45 to 60 days, Direct LTx arranged for a provider to drop fiber in our cage in a day-and-a-half.  KeyNet quickly coordinated with Direct LTx and connected the service into their systems.   Within two days, not 45 to 60 days, KeyNet Technologies and all our clients’ services were connected with a Direct LTx-provided, fully redundant service.  KeyNet and our clients were fully operational through the services arranged by Direct LTx during this unprecedented time.    

Even in the best of circumstances, access to bandwidth is measured in weeks.   The fact that KeyNet was back to where we needed to be in 48 hours is an extraordinary testament to Direct LTx and what they are willing to do for their customers. 

One of the reasons we initially selected Direct LTx was the fact that they have multiple carriers built into their facility.  We know Direct LTx maintains strong relationships with their carriers, realizing the importance of connectivity and redundancy for their customers.  Direct LTx’s relationship and services paid enormous dividends in the unprecedented aftermath of Ida.

Tops in the Market:  Many of KeyNet’s clients and business partners who have colocation relationships with Direct LTx’s data center competitors serving the Eastern Pennsylvania market were unable to shorten typical timeframes or deliver solutions during the widespread outages caused by Ida.  Some of them are likely to move their infrastructure and services to Direct LTx in Reading.

Actually Delivering:  Hurricane Ida was a true “storm of a century,” and it is tough to be too critical of anyone who suffered any kind of service interruption given the extreme circumstances in the IT infrastructure supply chain.   KeyNet has significant insight into the service provider ecosystem.  Nearly everyone tried to help their customers on a good faith basis through the outages following Ida.  But the desire to deliver and actually delivering are two different things.   In the case of the unprecedented impact to the business operations of KeyNet’s primary and backup internet provider outages, nobody delivered like Direct LTx did. 

Partnership is Not Just an Empty Word:   At KeyNet Technologies, partnering with vendors, businesses and clients is a critical approach to successfully supporting the operations and mission delivery of KeyNet and our clients.  We look for similar qualities in our vendors when choosing long-term vendor relationships that help us deliver critical services to our clients.  KeyNet’s partnership with Direct LTx is a great example of a partnership with a focus on delivering for client needs.  KeyNet has been partners with Direct LTx for many years.  While round-the-clock service, personal attention, and exceeding expectations regularly is a common thread at Direct LTx, their performance during IDA showed that Direct LTx is a true partner of KeyNet and our customers.

For information on Keynet Technologies, visit https://www.keynettech.com/ . To learn more about how Direct LTx’s customer experience, uptime record, and commitment to superior service on behalf of customers’ mission-critical systems, email sales@DirectLTx.com.