The break in the Seacom undersea cable almost two months ago has prompted academic network service provider Tenet to issue a request for proposals to supply it with a disaster recovery service.
Tenet issued its request for proposals yesterday, for “disaster recovery international bandwidth”, with a closing date of 7 October. No value is given for the request, but the contract, when awarded, would run for at least 12 months.
“We want to enter negotiations with prospective suppliers as soon as possible after the closure date,” says Tenet CTO Andrew Alston.
Currently, Tenet, which supplies Internet connectivity to almost all of SA's higher education intitutions, universities and several major research centres, uses east coast cable Seacom as its primary means of international access.
However, Tenet, along with many of Seacom's customers, received a rude wake-up call when the cable experienced a major outage for almost a week at the beginning of July.
When Seacom became operational in mid 2009, Tenet was one of the first customers and was the first organisation to land international bandwidth from the cable, through its own link to the Durban campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, without Telkom intervention.
Tenet now operates a network that has a 10Gbps circuit to London, redundant backhaul circuits from the Seacom landing station, the SA National Research Network (Sanren) 10Gbps backbone, The Sanren Johannesburg ring, the GEN3 MPLS network provided by Neotel, IP connect bandwidth into the ADSL cloud, and various fibre-optic access circuits. Tenet also operates transit and peering links in Cape Town, Johannesburg and London.
Alston says having a disaster recovery system was always in Tenet's plans and the Seacom break just highlighted the need for a backup.
Tenet's own network remained operational during the break, but it was a close call for the service.
In terms of Tenet's request for proposals, it wants to be able to access a service supplying it with no less than 1Gbbps of data within two hours of a break on the Seacom cable. However, Tenet needs to be able to increase this capacity periodically should it feel the need.
Tenet wants the disaster recovery service to have a two-tiered billing structure that has a standby service charged at a significantly lower level than the active or disaster recovery, charge.
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