Having 24X7 operations across all facilities, high availability and uptime are the critical components. The company has two facilities each in Mumbai and Hyderabad, and each of these are connected to the parent companys facility in the US. The India-based WAN network is a DS3 (45 Mbps) mesh network with all sites interconnected. In the case of one link failing, the path can be ensured through manual routing to reach and connect all sites. Similarly, in case any of the connecting ATM links (DS3) fail on the international site, parallel links take the complete load and continue services until the affected links come back in operations.

"Each time a failure would lead us to change routes manually and apply them to operate network in an optimal way. The affected segment would be unavailable for 40-60 minutes, thus we were working with a network in 98-99% uptime but could not better the same," Bagdadi says. Recently, the company implemented dynamic routing (OSPF protocol) between India WAN areas and international WAN links. Dynamic routing resolves the availability and uptime problem by constructing routing tables automatically, based on information carried by routing protocols, and allowing the network to act nearly autonomously in avoiding network failures and blockages. This has enabled an automated fail-over for traffic between India and US or among the India WAN sites. "Now we are able to pursue and achieve uptime and availability in the range of 99.9% and above," he adds.

Balance in Life
With career completely overshadowing most of our personal space, Bagdadi too had to face the dilemma of choosing his work over family. But, as is said, behind every successful man there is a woman; he too was fortunate to have Fehmida as his life partner who completely understood the demands of building a budding career. A homemaker in the real sense, Fehmida has been Bagdadis sounding board for all his ideas for the past 27 years of marriage. "Marriage is a two-way street where empathy is a vital element to make it successful."

Being always short on time means that the couple does not talk shop, and travels for spending quality time together. Bonding with his two sonsDanish studying computer engineering and Kashif, studying in class VIItops Bagdadis priority list. "Both being in the growing stage, it is important for me to spend quality time with them." Bagdadis spare time also sees him in a new role, as a visiting faculty to colleges where he mentors students on their future.

Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in

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