Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) on Wednesday reported that while Hurricane Sandy left thousands of customers particularly in its New York City region without service, having the right disaster recovery (DR) plans in place has enabled the service provider more efficiently restore service.
Like other telcos, Windstream's customers located in either New Jersey or New York City area were the hardest hit by the storm.
In the New York City area, the telco said it two of its switch sites were impacted, and flooding is hampering its efforts to quickly resolve outage issues. Despite these issues, the company said in a statement that "we are aggressively working to restore service in the New York City area."
On Friday, Windstream posted an update on its Hurricane Sandy update site that it made "significant progress overnight getting its New York City switches at 75 Broad St. back online, addint that it "expects the switches to be fully operational by 10:30 a.m. ET."
Meanwhile, in Newark, NJ, the telco said that its switch is back on commercial power as various network facilities in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
However, one of the customers, a technology services provider, was able to have the telco switch access to their critical data in their Windstream's Bethlehem, Pa. data center after they lost power.
"We set up shop for them at Windstream's Bethlehem Data Center so that when they got there an hour later, we had them ready to go," wrote Kip Turco, Senior Vice President of Data Center Operations at Windstream, in a blog post. "Their data, which they'd colocated with us, was already available and they could access it and get back in business."
Providing Continuity of Operations (COOP) and DR services has been something that Windstream has been preparing for aggressively in recent years. In addition to expanding its network footprint by purchasing PAETEC, the telco has also made a number of key purchases of data center providers including Hosted Solutions and introducing a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution.
Since making its purchase of Hosted Solutions and other regional data center operators, the telco has been building out new facilities in markets such as Little Rock, Boston, and Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C.
For more:
- here's Windstream's blog post
- Channel Partners also has this article
Commentary: Prepare for the worst--now
Special Coverage: Hurricane Sandy's aftermath
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*Editors Note: We updated the headline to better reflect the state of where Windstream is at with its ongoing restoration efforts.