WebCOBRA Online Throughout Hurricane Ike

Posted on September 23rd, 2008 by jwolgamott |

City wide power does not affect WebCOBRA

As you probably saw on national news, Houston, Texas went dark early in the morning on Friday, September 12th, and has been slow to come back online.

Many of our friends only now (at the time of writing) have power, and some do not have cable or internet. WebCOBRA, on the opposite side of the spectrum, ran without issue during the week long power loss and without management by Travis employees.

Travis was out of the office starting on Friday, September 12th, and was back to work on Wednesday, September 19th

Commitment to Distributed and Automated Systems Key

Hurricane Ike was a perfect test of all of our systems; we designed WebCOBRA to be fault-tolerant and fully-automated, and we needed both to keep WebCOBRA running.

We created WebCOBRA to run itself; all systems need to be automated and automatically scheduled so that it doesn’t rely on human interaction. This includes the following systems:

  • Nightly scheduling of correspondence
  • Report email subscriptions
  • Delivering RelationalAPI copies of databases to customers
  • Backing up, indexing, data validation, and other database administration tasks

Since we took the time to deliver WebCOBRA in an automated fashion, when Travis employees were home without power or access to the internet, WebCOBRA kept on rolling. And, more importantly, our nation-wide customer base was able to access their COBRA system without our intervention.

Reliability and Performance from Cyrus One and Sunguard

WebCOBRA is housed in two datacenters in Houston, Cyrus One and Sunguard. The Datacenters are 40 miles apart (Houston is a big city) and are owned and operated by different companies. Both Sunguard and Cyrus performed up to their guarantees and were instrumental in keeping WebCOBRA online.

Both Sunguard and Cyrus lost power from the local electrical grid, and both were able to automatically provide power from their UPS systems. These UPS systems were immediately recharged from diesel engines, which both datacenters had adequate supplies.

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