People all around the world rely on systems - systems for bill pay, shopping, medical needs - almost everything. Systems need to be available all the time, especially when it means getting to where you need to go. When transportation systems go down, disruptions can ripple through all aspects of life. When designing and deploying such an important system, you can take a chance in hopes of never experiencing a system failure, or you can implement redundancies that ensure system reliability.

Ensuring Reliability

Reliability describes the ability of a system or component to continue to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time. This reliability is threatened when key components of a system fail. To combat these failures, INIT designs systems which have redundancies built in, so when a component does fail, the system can continue to operate seamlessly to the end user: you.

Keeping Systems Available

One of the ways INIT works to keep our systems available is by distributing data communication across multiple endpoints. This is known as load balancing: the process of distributing network traffic across multiple servers to not only guarantee the delivery of the end service, but also that no single endpoint holds too much demand. For example, by load balancing web servers, the end user won't experience any interruption when attempting to check their purse balance, even during a single web server failure. Other redundancies such as highly available storage systems, servers, and networking also ensure failures are invisible to the end user.

Here are a few more INIT standards and practices when it comes to redundancy:

• Storage and servers running in a RAID configuration, which is the combining of multiple physical disk drive components into a logical unit for the purpose of data redundancy
• Stacking network switches, which allows two or more switches to act as a single, large switch while providing multiple data pathways
• Deploying second geographically different sites for disaster scenarios

Building reliable systems is just one of many ways INIT continues to lead the market in transportation solutions.