The Northeastern part of the United States saw two natural disasters within the span of five days of each other. The first was in the Washington, D.C. area: A 5.8 earthquake on August 23, 2011. On August 28, Hurricane Irene made her way up the east coast, leaving nearly 5.5 million people without power. We do everything we can to prepare our facilities for natural disasters (generator power backup, staffing, redundant bandwidth links and providers, etc.), and given the recent events, now might be a good time to start thinking about how your servers respond when something out of the ordinary happens … Let’s look at two relatively easy ways you can set your business up to scale and recover.

The first option you may consider would be to set up a multi-tiered environment by deploying multiple servers in various geographical locations. Your servers in each location could be accessed via load balancing or round robin DNS. In this kind of high-availability environment, your servers could handle the incoming requests more quickly with the load being split amongst the multiple data centers. The failover would be just a few seconds should you lose connectivity to one of the locations.

The second option to consider would be the private image repository for our CloudLayer Computing. This options allows you to save a private image template in different data centers, each ready for quick deployment without having to install and configure the same operating system and applications. Should you need additional resources or lose connectivity to your instance in one facility, you can deploy the saved image in another facility. The failover time would be only in the provisioning process of the Computer Instance … which doesn’t take too long.

Scalability makes sense no matter what situation you may be facing – from natural disaster to hitting the front page of Reddit. If you have any questions about these scalability options, “Click to Chat” on our site or give us a call and a sales rep can help you get prepared. Your infrastructure may have come through these recent events unscathed, but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. The “It’s better to be safe than sorry” cliche is a cliche for a reason: It’s worth saying often.

-Greg