When an accidental fiber-optic cable cut disrupted businesses in greater Boston, Ardais, a clinical genomics company based in Lexington, Mass., lost connection to its service provider for nine hours. That’s when the company decided it had to add a second connection to avoid any further downtime. (For more on Ardais, see Capturing Clinical Information, Bio-IT World October 2003).

Service outages, while sporadic and of varying length, have a great impact on Ardais’ ability to do business. Aside from the aggravating loss of e-mail and FTP services, Internet disruptions prevent company staff from reaching a production database (hosted by the provider) where orders are placed and shipments are verified.

Ardais looked at alternatives to bypass such problems in the future. “We looked at all the basic services -- straight land lines, DSL, etc.,” says Miguel Cintron, IT infrastructure manager. Not surprisingly, the services were evaluated on a range of criteria, including price and performance. (This project was started by Cintron’s predecessor.) Essentially, Ardais was looking for a second path to the hosting center and some way to automatically shift traffic to that path when the primary connection was disrupted.

There are several ways to accomplish this goal. For instance, one consideration was to use wide-area networking (WAN) equipment and services that supported the routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), which provides a number of features, including automatic failover in the case of a disruption of one link. But the IT department deemed the initial costs for hardware, service, and long-term maintenance for BGP excessive.

So Ardais turned to an approach from the WAN equipment company FatPipe Networks that included a WAN device and a 1.5-Mbps wireless service. Ardais installed the FatPipe WARP, a device that allows the use of multiple services to make multiple connections to a hosting site or the Internet.

The solution let Ardais use a low-cost wireless service as the alternative route to the hosting site. The link also provided Internet access so e-mail communications with the outside world are maintained and files can still be downloaded using FTP when there is a service outage on the primary link.

When the regular landline service and the wireless service are working properly, the WARP device can take advantage of both paths (in effect, giving Ardais much higher aggregate throughput). If the landline is cut or service disrupted for any reason, all the traffic is carried over the wireless connection.

One factor that led Ardais to the FatPipe product was the ease-of-use issue – the IT department did not have the staff to dedicate much time to managing whatever solution was chosen. In that regard, Cintron notes, “it’s completely self-sustaining and self-sufficient.” He says he has not had any problems with it in his time with Ardais.

This article first appeared in Bio-IT World’s Inside IT newsletter. Sign up for a free subscription.