Penta completes ultra-high availability business continuity infrastructure

Swiss private cloud provider Penta now offers the industry’s highest possible specifications in business continuity and disaster recovery with the completion of a year-long infrastructure project in the Tier-4 rated Lausanne data center.

The Lausanne and central Geneva IT infrastructure are now continuously replicated using 10Gbs and 1Gbs fiber optic connections. With backups performed in real-time it means zero data loss in the event that one of the data centers goes down.

Penta’s Lausanne data center facility is managed by BrainServe, which provides the building, server rooms, power, cooling and physical safety and security. BrainServe’s Lausanne facility was awarded Tier 4 Design status by the Uptime Institute on 8 July, one of only two in Switzerland and one of 15 Europe-wide.

“Our clients can now benefit from the industry’s highest standards in business continuity planning,” says Penta CEO Farhad Khalilnia. “With a Penta business continuity plan companies can rely on their IT being up and running at all times, no matter what happens and with virtually no interruptions or data loss due to unforeseen circumstances.”

Says Penta COO Hossein Fezzazi: “With this new infrastructure Penta is uniquely placed in Switzerland to offer active-active configurations with an RPO of zero and very low RTO to a data center rated at the highest fault tolerance level possible.”

Tier 4 fault tolerant data centers produce an expected 99.995% uptime, which allows for only 26.28 minutes of downtime a year. Together with Penta’s central Geneva data center – in the Equinix facility – and real-time backups this theoretical downtime is reduced further.

Penta’s two Swiss data centers are geographically separated by 50km in areas with low risk of natural and man-made disasters as well as high political stability. The data centers’ physical locations are managed by two different entities, located in two different cantons and supplied by different electricity suppliers, among other safeguards to ensure no single point of failure.