Two data centers, one cluster, no single point of failure
If an entire data center went dark, your phones would reconnect to the other city within about a minute and calls would keep landing. Here is how that works, in plain terms.
Two complete data centers. Either one can run everything.
IHS Phone runs as one system across our Houston and Dallas data centers. Each site has its own equipment and its own phone-network connections, and every piece of your service (settings, people, phone menus, voicemail, recordings, faxes, texts and call history) is copied between them every second.
Every customer has a home city and the other city as automatic backup. Your phones, your apps and the phone network that delivers your incoming calls all know both, in order, so if one city stops responding, everything moves to the other on its own.
- Switch-over happens automatically, in about a minute, with no one from your office or ours involved
- Incoming calls reach whichever city answers
- When the affected city returns, it catches up and resumes by itself
- More regions are being added for customers across the country and abroad
What a failure looks like from your desk
This is what happens if an entire site becomes unreachable. It runs without human intervention, and we rehearse it on a schedule.
| When | What happens | What you notice |
|---|---|---|
| Right away | Our monitoring, which watches from outside both cities, confirms the site is down | Calls in progress at that site drop; everything else continues |
| Within seconds | The surviving city takes charge of your settings, voicemail, recordings and faxes | Nothing |
| About a minute | Phones and apps reconnect to the surviving city; incoming calls follow | Phones show connected; calls ring normally |
| Ongoing | Phone menus, queues, voicemail, recording and fax all work from the surviving city | Full service; voicemail left before the failure is playable |
| Recovery | The affected city rejoins, catches up, and phones return to their home city on their own | Nothing |
Layers of protection beneath the switch-over
Our own phone lines, two carriers
Every number is connected through two major carriers, each aware of both data centers. A carrier problem is routed around automatically, and for the worst case each number can forward to a cell phone or answering service you choose.
Watched from outside
Monitoring from a third location, independent of both data centers, checks every part of the service around the clock, including real test calls through the phone network with the audio verified.
Encrypted backups, rehearsed restores
Daily encrypted backups to several locations, continuous protection of your settings and records, and an automated recovery rehearsal every week.
Settings cannot be lost by a mistake
Every change is recorded with one-click undo, deleted items wait in a 30-day recycle bin, and a snapshot is taken before any large change.
Maintenance without downtime
Upgrades are applied one city at a time while the other carries the calls, so maintenance never means an outage.
Protected against attacks
Hardened and continuously monitored networks, automatic blocking of attackers, and protection against large-scale flooding attacks on our voice services.
Built with room to grow
Each data center is sized to carry every customer alone with capacity to spare, and we add capacity by adding equipment and regions, not by rebuilding. Full-load tests, with recording turned on, are part of every release.
See the whole platform in a 20-minute demo
We will walk through your call flows, compliance needs and phones, then show you exactly how IHS Phone handles them. No pressure, no scripts.