Toronto,
Canada Network stability has always been a priority for WSI, a fact proven during the unprecedented August 2003 blackout that affected millions of homes and businesses across the northeastern U.S. and Canada. While many I.T. companies were left in the dark until power levels stabilized, WSI’s full services were back up in less than 4 hours and its critical systems were unaffected by the blackout. Lewis attributes this success under such extreme circumstances to the company’s investment in backup systems and well-defined disaster recovery protocols. “From the moment power was lost, our backup systems maintained our core services and on-site generators were activated to restore reliable hosting capacity,” explains Lewis. WSI’s system of redundant Internet connections meant connectivity to the Internet was uninterrupted, even though many area Internet Service Providers were offline or operating at reduced capacity. As the world’s leading Internet Solutions franchise, the demands placed on the WSI Data Center are significant. Every day it serves the operational needs of over 700 franchised offices worldwide and thousands of hosted websites. WSI’s global e-Marketplace model also relies on the Toronto Data Center to unite numerous production centers and suppliers with franchisees and the Home Office for vital day-to-day business functions. This amounts to over 2 million emails, over a half a billion hits to its web servers and 350GB of outgoing bandwidth each month. Through its regular investment in high-end equipment and an ongoing partnership with IBM, WSI has consistently met these demands while maintaining the highest levels of service – definitely a point of pride for the rapidly growing franchise network. “We project even more growth through the 4th quarter of this year,” states Lewis “and further spending on hardware and staffing to meet that growth” he concludes. To keep things running smoothly, all of WSI’s systems are monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by experienced I.T. professionals, including Microsoft Certified System Administrators. Bob Lewis,
WSI’s Chief Technology Officer brings 20 years of I.T. experience
from Fortune 500 companies including Merrill Lynch, Aetna Life
Insurance and the Bank of Nova Scotia. His background includes
all areas of application development, project management, server
and database management. Looking ahead, Lewis is excited about
expanding WSI’s network capabilities by bringing on new
internet traffic routing hubs in selected countries, further enhancing
the speed and reliability of the company’s services. |