Redundant Data Center

UNOS manages two data centers (primary and backup) connected by redundant high-speed fiber telecommunications lines. Each of these data centers has:

• Generators and uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) to supply power in the event of an electrical outage; and the data centers are on different power grids to mitigate a local electrical outage impacting both locations
• Multiple internet service providers (ISPs) to mitigate the risk of an Internet outage caused by a specific vendor impacting access to the system
• Multiple physical telecommunications lines entering the building from different directions to mitigate the risk that physical destruction of the line impacts telephone access, Internet access, and access to the system
• Near real-time duplication of the data between data centers to mitigate the risk of catastrophic failure of a system causing loss of data
• Redundant firewalls, routers, and switches that control confidentiality and integrity by restricting access to key resources and increasing availability through redundancy, which means that if one fails, others are available to perform the task
• Redundant servers – the database, Web, file, and email servers are all redundant and internal server devices, such as power supplies, disk drives, and disk controllers are all redundant to mitigate the risk of hardware failure causing an interruption of availability. In addition, virtualization will be used which allows for copies of all servers to be kept in immediate standby if needed locally and at the hot site. Virtualization also allows for physical servers to be added or changed out without impacting the individual applications running on the server pool.