At Northern911 our core business is helping people in times of need and handling emergency calls. It’s what we do all day, every day. We provide 911 (E911 and VoIP) Call Routing, Alarm Monitoring, Fire Dispatch and Telematics dispatching. Our services are proven and our results are excellent. We care about quality!

Disaster Planning

Northern911 has a primary location in Sudbury and a back up location in North Bay. This back up location was chosen to be geographically separate in the event of a large disaster.

We have infrastructure in Sudbury and infrastructure in North Bay. Both locations are served by the same ISP provider but out of different Central Offices. This gives us further redundancy in the event our upstream provider has a problem. At our prime location we are served by a primary ISP on dual redundant diversely routed fiber paths. We also have a separate supplier with a third path who does not share facilities. In North Bay we are served by both the prime ISP and by an alternative supplier, again on alternate facilities.

All critical hardware in Sudbury has a redundant unit available. We have redundant high availability Firewalls. We have multiple redundant switches. We operate multiple IBM servers with VMware. Should one server fail, the services running there will automatically fail over to the other servers. (There is some downtime here while this occurs.) We operate an Infinity telephone switch as the engine of our call platform. Dual power supplies, RAID drives, the works. We have a local switch to handle our 911 and critical traffic during switch maintenance etc. We have a completely redundant Infinity switch in our North Bay office.

We operate an IBM Storage Area Network (SAN) with dual controllers, dual network cards, and dual power supplies etc. Data is striped across multiple drives. Data is backed up via incremental daily backups, and weekly full backups. Tapes are taken off site on a regular basis. We maintain a 4 week tape rotation. Systems that we have deemed critical replicate their application data to our North Bay facility. We have “Double-Take” data replication/disaster recovery software. (Used by more than half of the Fortune 500 companies) Systems that we have deemed critical replicate their data to the North Bay site in near “real time”. All critical devices that we operate either come with dual power supplies from the manufacturer or are plugged into a special device that allows power from two sources. All critical devices are powered by two UPS battery back up systems. The building is supplied electricity by Sudbury Hydro. We are in a very reliable area close to their office and are their back up call center. In the event of a failure of the grid, we have an auto start generator that powers up in about one minute to run the entire building.

The computer rooms in each location have triple redundant air conditioning. Both buildings are monitored for Fire and Burglary. Disaster planning is part of our culture and we analyze ways to serve our clients better on a regular basis.