So you’re the operations guy for Neustar keeping track of all of the nation’s phone numbers. That’s a lot of data, huh?
Currently our numbering system handles close to 500 million interactions a year. There are 500 million active telephone numbers that are in our system, and our storage capacity is scaled to handle much more than that amount.
How do you handle all of that?
Our applications are running on Blade cluster servers, with a Linux operating system; our databases are IBM servers, AIX operating system, running with Oracle 11G. We have a primary data center and we have a disaster recovery data center (DR). Our databases are in full synchronous replication, so that at any time, any database activity and the status of the system is fully in sync in both the primary and the DR data centers.
How reliable is the system?
We operate under what is called the 9 system….3 nines, 4 nines, 5 nines. Three nines is 99.9% and contractually our system has to be fully operational 99.9% of the time or we get penalized. We often exceed that! We work hard to deliver 99.999% reliability and better all of the time. That’s why my team, and all of the teams, are in a constant state of alert for any issue that affects service availability. And the goal is to jump, to troubleshoot, to get to the answer, resolve it, and restore service as quickly as possible, and minimize service unavailability time.
What do you do when you’re not maintaining the systems for Neustar?
My sons and I are fanatical about Duke basketball!
So, you’re watching a Duke game—last thirty seconds—and your Neustar emergency pager goes off. What do you do?
Is it the championship?
ROB
COFFMAN
Director