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Wednesday 25th November 2020
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Hello Subscriber
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Today I'd like to share with you some seemingly useless information.
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The island of Helgoland (Germany, Northern Sea) had last weekend no phone- and internet connection for 48 hours. They are not using STS prepayment meters, so there was no need to buy a credit token. But what will happen in regions with prepaid meters? If you have also off-line vending stations, everything is fine to a certain extent.
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The far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok was four days ago hit by an ice storm and left around 148,000 homes without water and electricity. The situation is still not complete recovered. This morning still 50k homes are without electrical power supply.
We are here in Shenzhen (Southern China) and we have very rarely ice storms. But, have you ever reviewed your personal or utility recovery procedures?
Depending on your region you can have various natural disasters, having impact on the power supply infrastructure.
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An AMI system together with push-messages from the energy meters can support efficiently the utility response teams.
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Maybe you've not noticed that our web-server was down on last Wednesday. While we've got the confirmed outage information by a third party tool within one minute, our service provider claimed that it's not their problem. This still seems to be the first level response from IT companies worldwide. Anyway, this company has more than 18 million customers and within a short time all their servers went down, their company website and customer support inclusive.
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Half hour later they published a tweet:
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Our team is aware of an issue affecting customer’s access to accounts as well as access to our site. We apologize for this inconvenience and are working as quickly as we can to address these issues. We appreciate you patience and understanding in this matter.
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— GoDaddy Help (@GoDaddyHelp) November 18, 2020
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Our website returned after one hour while other customers had to wait up to 4 hours.
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What do we learn?
Our internet presence is not really important, but your infrastructure is. AMI servers must be redundant and preferable at different locations. Server redundancy gives also additional possibilities for load balancing and server maintenance.
In case, just talk to us. We always like to implement the best possible solutions.
If the whole internet is down (see Helgoland), also we are running out of options.
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Thank you for your interest, have a happy day and stay safe,
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Reinhard Günther
and the CLOUGLOBAL Team
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