Iowa Data Center Employs SONET Ring

Infrastructure Technology Solutions (ITS), a leading provider of data center services in Eastern Iowa, recently enhanced its Internet access capabilities by adding a SONET service to one of its Internet circuits.

Company President, Joel Althoff, explains the need behind the fiber build out, “We were relying on two different carriers for Internet redundancy and were interested in increasing our bandwidth.  The SONET ring allows us to increase redundancy and reliability while allowing us to pass on the cost-savings from our brokered price to our customers.”

The SONET ring was brokered by Kurtz Communications of Dubuque, Iowa.  “Working with Kurtz Communications enabled us to realize incredible efficiencies as they were able to negotiate our contract and find the best deal for us across multiple carriers,” states Althoff.

Century Link is the provider of the SONET ring, which runs over OC 12 and can provide over 600Mbit/s connectivity.

“Current customers should notice better speed and bandwidth in general when moving data across their connections with our servers, and in the event of a fiber cut connections will fail over immediately with no noticeable downtime.”

One requirement of a SONET ring is that the fiber paths are never within 25 feet of each other, maintaining an unlikelihood of both lines involved in simultaneous cuts.

ITS also purchases Internet bandwidth from an additional carrier on different facilities and can provide layer 2 point to point connectivity between facilities via this medium.

Infrastructure Technology Solutions (ITS) is a full-service IT company located in Monticello, Iowa.  They provide Managed Services, data recovery, network support, new computer sales, server hosting and web services to customers across Iowa and the United States from their state-of-the-art data center.