Development Laboratory and Computer Room
Although much of our work is directly upon client machines, usually via VPN and VNC connections, we have an extensive development laboratory and computer room complex.
We have duplicated permanent connections to the web, serviced by separate firewalls (each with an additional cold backup), with a bank of inbound and outbound modems across multiple phone lines to ensure accessability in the event of problems with the local external web infrastructure. Our web servers are duplicated, with automatic fallback.
All other essential servers are triplicated, with automatic fallback and graceful degradation, while all equipment is supported by a bank of UPS devices.
Most servers and development machines run variants of Linux, but we also have Mac and Solaris machines, while the duplicated virtual machine servers offer variants of SCO Unix and several variations on a theme by Microsoft, as well as every major distribution of Linux and BSD. Additionally, an emulator on the mainframe server supports the IBM operating systems MFT, VM/370, MVT and MVS, for work with legacy systems, in particular those written in Cobol, PL/1 and BAL [assembler].
The entire complex is built upon a Gigabit backbone, for ultra-fast server synchronisation and backup. In addition to local backup, with all data archived on a minimum of 3 separate physical hosts, we maintain offsite security copies in two other locations.