The Verse - Volume 20
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Success Story - Professional Energy Management

About a year ago, the purple guys started the VersentCheck service plan for Professional Energy Management (www.professionalenergygroup.com). In 2003, Versent created their web site, but Professional Energy used another company for their technology support. Now Versent is able to do “nifty-cool” projects for them.

Because the nature of Professional Energy’s business is heavily dependent on communicating, gathering information and performing transactions online, Professional Energy needs to always be able to access the Internet. One of the projects the purple guys just completed for Professional Energy is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) automatic failover system.

What is an ISP failover? Quite simply, it is a system set up to switch from an ISP that has gone down (lost its connection) to a backup ISP. It’s a backup quarterback for Professional Energy’s Internet connection.

Here are the basics on how an ISP failover works. Professional Energy has Time Warner broadband and Birch DSL coming in to their office. A new firewall was installed to make configuration changes and to facilitate quick failover The connection that is used in everyday activities is the Time Warner broadband connection. Should the Time Warner connection go down, Professional Energy is quickly switched over to the Birch DSL line. Professional Energy uses a web application that constantly updates and they just see a flicker during the failover.

This project has been successfully tested and the guys at Professional Energy are very happy. Their cables to the firewall are color-coded, labeled and documented for Professional Energy. The purple guys went over the setup with the staff at Professional Energy and made the switch as easy as "pull the blue cable" and they’ll know what to do.

The purple guys love it when we can find solutions that keep our clients UP and running. Hopefully, Professional Energy’s main Internet connection will never go down. The old saying goes, “hope is not a strategy.” Thanks to the ISP failover set up by Versent, Professional Energy now has a strategy to keeping working if they lose their main Internet connection.